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Saved by a log: how do humans perform hybrid visual and memory search?
1Visual Attention Lab, Department of Surgery, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, 64 Sidney St., Suite 170, Cambridge, MA 02139-4170, USA. wolfe@search.bwh.harvard.edu
Psychological Science
|May 25, 2012
Summary
Searching for one target among many visual items is faster than expected. Response times increase logarithmically with memory set size, not linearly, improving search efficiency for experts.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Human Visual Perception
- Information Processing
Background:
- Visual search tasks often involve identifying targets within large sets of distractors.
- Previous models assumed linear scaling between memory and visual search, predicting slow performance with many targets.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how memory set size affects visual search performance.
- To determine if visual search scales linearly or non-linearly with the number of items held in memory.
Main Methods:
- Participants memorized 1 to 100 target images.
- They then searched for any of these targets in visual displays containing 1 to 16 objects.
- Response times were recorded and analyzed based on memory and visual set sizes.
Main Results:
- Response times increased linearly with the number of objects in the visual display (visual set size).
- Response times increased logarithmically with the number of memorized targets (memory set size).
- Performance with 100 targets in memory was accurately predicted by models based on smaller memory sets.
Conclusions:
- Visual search is more efficient than predicted by linear models, especially when searching for any of many targets.
- Findings suggest a binary coding mechanism for visual objects in memory.
- Results have implications for real-world search tasks performed by experts, such as radiologists or security screeners.
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