Our final Cognition Workshop of the year will take place Thursday 5/31 from 3:30 – 5:00 PM in Harper 140. Refreshments and snacks will be served.
Our speaker will be Michael Hout, Associate Professor of Psychology at New Mexico State University. You can find a list of publications on his Google scholar page, and read more about his work on his website.
Passive search strategies improve attentional guidance and object recognition during demanding visual search
Abstract:
Hybrid visual memory search (i.e., search for more items than can be maintained in working memory) requires observers to search both through a visual display and through the contents of memory in order to find designated “target” items (e.g., walking through the grocery store looking for items on your grocery list, airport baggage screeners looking for many prohibited items in travelers’ luggage). A substantial body of research on this task has shown that observers are able to search for a very large number of items with relative ease. However, the attentional mechanisms that drive hybrid search remain somewhat unclear. In our first two experiments, we investigated the role that cognitive strategies play in facilitating hybrid search for categorically-defined targets. We hypothesized that observers in a hybrid search task would naturally adopt a strategy in which they remain somewhat passive, allowing targets to “pop out,” rather than actively directing their attention around the visual display. Experiment 1 compared behavioral responses in passive, active, and uninstructed hybrid search. Contrary to our expectations, we found that uninstructed search tended to be active in nature, but we also found that adopting a passive strategy led to more efficient performance. In Experiment 2, we replicated these findings, and tracked the eye movements of observers. We found that oculomotor behavior in passive hybrid search was characterized by faster, larger saccades, a tendency to fixate fewer non-target items, and an improved ability to classify items as either targets or distractors. In Experiment 3, we explored whether the benefits of passive search were limited only to particularly demanding search tasks (i.e., those that require observers to search for many items at once), or if performance benefits also appear when people are asked to find a single, categorically-defined target. Once again, we tracked the eye movements of participants and found strikingly similar results to our hybrid search task. Namely, that passive searchers were faster and less accurate, but more efficient overall. Additionally, passive search led to improved attentional guidance, better object recognition, and fewer target recognition failures. Together, our results indicate two surprising findings. First, that hybrid visual search is more active in nature than expected, and second, that adopting a passive search strategy leads to performance and oculomotor improvements during hybrid and single-target search. These findings fill a gap in the literature regarding the nature of strategy use during visual search, and the potential benefits of strategy adoption during challenging search tasks.
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