Turning visual search time on its head.

Vision Research
S P Arun

Abstract

Our everyday visual experience frequently involves searching for objects in clutter. Why are some searches easy and others hard? It is generally believed that the time taken to find a target increases as it becomes similar to its surrounding distractors. Here, I show that while this is qualitatively true, the exact relationship is in fact not linear. In a simple search experiment, when subjects searched for a bar differing in orientation from its distractors, search time was inversely proportional to the angular difference in orientation. Thus, rather than taking search reaction time (RT) to be a measure of target-distractor similarity, we can literally turn search time on its head (i.e. take its reciprocal 1/RT) to obtain a measure of search dissimilarity that varies linearly over a large range of target-distractor differences. I show that this dissimilarity measure has the properties of a distance metric, and report two interesting insights come from this measure: First, for a large number of searches, search asymmetries are relatively rare and when they do occur, differ by a fixed distance. Second, search distances can be used to elucidate object representations that underlie search - for example, these representations are r...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jun 12, 2013·Vision Research·Marisa CarrascoPreeti Verghese
Sep 12, 2014·Journal of Neurophysiology·Kalathupiriyan A Zhivago, Sripati P Arun
Nov 8, 2019·Psychological Science·Aakash AgrawalS P Arun
Aug 1, 2018··Michael LudwigGary Meyer

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