Don't hide the instruction manual: A dynamic trade-off between using internal and external templates during visual...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Traditional visual search studies focus on internal memory encoding.
• Real-world search often utilizes externally accessible information.
• The role of external templates in visual search is under-explored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate participants' use of external templates during visual search.
• To determine if external template use impacts search performance.
• To understand the mechanisms behind external template utilization.

Main Methods:

• Participants searched for targets in crowded displays.
• External templates were made available for reference.
• Task difficulty and search complexity were varied.
• Memory offloading and verification strategies were analyzed.

Main Results:

• Participants frequently utilized external templates during search.
• External template use was associated with improved search performance.
• This behavior scaled with task difficulty.
• Participants used templates for memory offloading and verification.

Conclusions:

• External information dynamically aids visual search, contrary to traditional models.
• External sampling serves dual roles: memory offloading and verification.
• Findings support a resource-efficient model of visual working memory.
• Current search models need extension to incorporate external information use.