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. 2017 Mar;1(3):0058.
doi: 10.1038/s41562-017-0058. Epub 2017 Mar 8.

Five Factors that Guide Attention in Visual Search

Jeremy M Wolfe  1 , Todd S Horowitz  2
Affiliations

Five Factors that Guide Attention in Visual Search

Jeremy M Wolfe et al. Nat Hum Behav. 2017 Mar.

Abstract

How do we find what we are looking for? Fundamental limits on visual processing mean that even when the desired target is in our field of view, we often need to search, because it is impossible to recognize everything at once. Searching involves directing attention to objects that might be the target. This deployment of attention is not random. It is guided to the most promising items and locations by five factors discussed here: Bottom-up salience, top-down feature guidance, scene structure and meaning, the previous history of search over time scales from msec to years, and the relative value of the targets and distractors. Modern theories of search need to specify how all five factors combine to shape search behavior. An understanding of the rules of guidance can be used to improve the accuracy and efficiency of socially-important search tasks, from security screening to medical image perception.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: JMW occasionally serves as an expert witness or consultant for which this article might be relevant. TSH has no competing interests to declare.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
On first glimpse, you know something about the distribution of colors and shapes but not how those colors and shapes are bound to each other. Find ‘M’s that are red and yellow.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
The basic visual search paradigm. A target (here a ‘T‘) is presented amidst a variable number of distractors. Search ‘efficiency’ can be indexed by the slope of the function relating reaction time (RT) to the visual set size. If the target in 2B is a red T, the slope for 2B will be half of that for 2A because attention can be limited to just half of the items in 2B.
Figure 3:
Figure 3:
Which items ‘pop-out’ of this display, and why?
Figure 4:
Figure 4:
Scene Guidance: Where is attention guided if you are looking for humans? What if the target was a bird?
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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