Hiding and finding: the relationship between visual concealment and visual search

Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
Daniel SmilekAlan Kingstone

Abstract

As an initial step toward developing a theory of visual concealment, we assessed whether people would use factors known to influence visual search difficulty when the degree of concealment of objects among distractors was varied. In Experiment 1, participants arranged search objects (shapes, emotional faces, and graphemes) to create displays in which the targets were in plain sight but were either easy or hard to find. Analyses of easy and hard displays created during Experiment 1 revealed that the participants reliably used factors known to influence search difficulty (e.g., eccentricity, target-distractor similarity, presence/absence of a feature) to vary the difficulty of search across displays. In Experiment 2, a new participant group searched for the targets in the displays created by the participants in Experiment 1. Results indicated that search was more difficult in the hard than in the easy condition. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants used presence versus absence of a feature to vary search difficulty with several novel stimulus sets. Taken together, the results reveal a close link between the factors that govern concealment and the factors known to influence search difficulty, suggesting that a visual search theory...Continue Reading

Citations

Jun 1, 2011·Attention, Perception & Psychophysics·Allison A BrennanJames T Enns
Apr 12, 2014·Attention, Perception & Psychophysics·Giles M AndersonAlan Kingstone
Jul 19, 2016·Cognitive Science·Grayden J F Solman, Alan Kingstone
May 10, 2017·The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology : QJEP·Yasmine B Sanderson
Nov 15, 2017·Attention, Perception & Psychophysics·Chris N H StreetAlan Kingstone
Dec 15, 2015·Radiation Protection Dosimetry·Jeremy M WolfeEmilie Josephs
Feb 14, 2020·Attention, Perception & Psychophysics·Motohiro Ito, Jun-Ichiro Kawahara
Apr 22, 2020·Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences·Alessandro GuidaJean-Philippe van Dijck

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