Visual search Flashcards
What is Google search?
Finding in comparing things based upon what we put in, and what is out there
What is classic visual search?
 cognitive psychology experiments where you must look for the target
What is a classic example of classic visual search
Treismsn and Galade (1980)
Looking for a target in a group of distractors
 this is Eva done using a feature search (easier) because it is a distinct object
or
a conjunctions search (harder) because it shares more features with the distractots
Why is feature search efficient and why is conjunction search inefficient?
Feature search objects stand out, whereas conjunction search objects are hidden, so you must move slowly to find it
Describe the different fairies of what happens to eye movement when we’re looking for something?
Fairies of classical visual search. Assume that attention is moving between items slightly from one item to the other until we reach our target- inefficient because it takes more eye movements
The global bay denotes that when we are looking at multiple objects, we tend to land somewhere in between almost like our eyes is taking an average -however, research has not found enough evidence for this

What are a few differences between lab search tasks and real life?
- Complexity of target and distractor. - Lab items very in number of dimensions, but real world are more complicated and we can’t pinpoint the number of distractions in real life
- Target specificity - lab has clearly defined target such as green L, but real life can be general or very specific e.g. look for the chair but it could be any chair. How do we know if it’s alright one?
- Background complexity - labs have clear background to make the target more visible, but in real life backgrounds could be as busy as a street!
- Item positioning.- in lab, they often put in random positions, but in real life we tend to have order like bedroom et cetera
- Frequency of searches. - lab we have a fixed number of trials, but in real life, we can either look for it once or as many times as we want to for years
- Size and movement. - lab searches and have small 2-D display and we don’t really need to move our whole body because we’re looking at a screen but in real life we have to move around in a 3-D environment 
What are the two ways to help us guide our search?
Bottom up, processing and top down processing
What is bottom up processing?
We look at target saliency/ how obvious their features are
What is top-down processing?
We use our prior knowledge to help us look for where the target could be
 how is top down processing useful
The more we know about the target, the easier it would be to find it
Explain guidance by scene semantics and give it an example
Just all context of a scene provides expectation of where to look (top down)
People were given a scene which sort of depicted a living room, and a bright light was placed, and majority of participants said that they would expect a TV to be there just from the gist
According to Wolfe et al (2011) what are the two types of guidance and searching in the scene?
- Selective pathway which uses key features and is quite limited.
- nonselective uses larger, semantic features and contextual guidance
Define inhibition of return
Inhibition of return is the idea that we are slower to go back to something that we have previously paid attention to an inactive search. This could be helpful by stopping us from revisiting rejected locations. (Foraging facilitator)
 however, this fist may not actually be the case
Explain the two examples of large scale such
- Jiang et al (2024) got past to look for a coin on concrete and some quadrants were used repeatedly so participants learnt that finding the coin was quicker when they went back to the same quadrants as the chance was high, it would be there
- Foulsham et al (2014) used a mobile tracker to record where people were looking when they had to search for a room, and then find a mailbox in that room . - In one condition. A bright pink ribbon was put around the target. However, there wasn’t much difference because it wasn’t what the person was looking for 
Give examples of searching in occupations
In a study conducted by mccarley (2004) 16. Normal observers search for knives in simulated baggage x-rays over several days and people got better, but scanning did not improve. So another experiment needed to be used.
In Biggs, 2013 study, they compared actual security professionals in airports to control participants and security staff were more accurate, but slower than the controls
Similarly, ! Radiologists  what presented with images, very quickly, and experts were above average at detecting abnormalities, even at a fast rate, perhaps top down approach 
