scholarly journals Human visual search behaviour is far from ideal

2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1849) ◽  
pp. 20162767 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Nowakowska ◽  
Alasdair D. F. Clarke ◽  
Amelia R. Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Foraging Behaviour ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Search Array ◽  
Central Vision ◽  
Search Behaviour ◽  
Line Segments ◽  
New Information ◽  
Compound Arrays ◽  
Actual Gain

Evolutionary pressures have made foraging behaviours highly efficient in many species. Eye movements during search present a useful instance of foraging behaviour in humans. We tested the efficiency of eye movements during search using homogeneous and heterogeneous arrays of line segments. The search target is visible in the periphery on the homogeneous array, but requires central vision to be detected on the heterogeneous array. For a compound search array that is heterogeneous on one side and homogeneous on the other, eye movements should be directed only to the heterogeneous side. Instead, participants made many fixations on the homogeneous side. By comparing search of compound arrays to an estimate of search performance based on uniform arrays, we isolate two contributions to search inefficiency. First, participants make superfluous fixations, sacrificing speed for a perceived (but not actual) gain in response certainty. Second, participants fixate the homogeneous side even more frequently than predicted by inefficient search of uniform arrays, suggesting they also fail to direct fixations to locations that yield the most new information.

Less is more: Simple stimuli provoke more variable search strategies.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Nowakowska ◽  
Alasdair D F Clarke ◽  
Jessica Christie ◽  
Josephine Reuther ◽  
Amelia R. Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Line Segment ◽  
Search Strategies ◽  
Complex Objects ◽  
Search Behaviour ◽  
Line Segments ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Efficient Search ◽  
Less Is More ◽  
Dramatic Shift

We measured the efficiency of 30 participants as they searched through simple line segment stimuli and through a set of complex icons. We observed a dramatic shift from highly variable, and mostly inefficient, strategies with the line segments, to uniformly efficient search behaviour with the icons. These results demonstrate that changing what may initially appear to be irrelevant, surface-level details of the task can lead to large changes in measured behaviour, and that visual primitives are not always representative of more complex objects.

scholarly journals Seeing Beyond Salience and Guidance: The Role of Bias and Decision in Visual Search

Vision ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Alasdair D. F. Clarke ◽  
Anna Nowakowska ◽  
Amelia R. Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Signal Detection ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Guided Search ◽  
Vision Science ◽  
Search Tasks ◽  
Field Of Vision

Visual search is a popular tool for studying a range of questions about perception and attention, thanks to the ease with which the basic paradigm can be controlled and manipulated. While often thought of as a sub-field of vision science, search tasks are significantly more complex than most other perceptual tasks, with strategy and decision playing an essential, but neglected, role. In this review, we briefly describe some of the important theoretical advances about perception and attention that have been gained from studying visual search within the signal detection and guided search frameworks. Under most circumstances, search also involves executing a series of eye movements. We argue that understanding the contribution of biases, routines and strategies to visual search performance over multiple fixations will lead to new insights about these decision-related processes and how they interact with perception and attention. We also highlight the neglected potential for variability, both within and between searchers, to contribute to our understanding of visual search. The exciting challenge will be to account for variations in search performance caused by these numerous factors and their interactions. We conclude the review with some recommendations for ways future research can tackle these challenges to move the field forward.

The Influence of Brightness Highlighting on Eye Movements within a Cockpit Display of Traffic Information

2005 ◽  
Vol 49 (17) ◽  
pp. 1644-1648
Author(s):  
Min-Ju Liao ◽  
Stacy Granada ◽  
Walter W. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Search Task ◽  
Traffic Information ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Detection Time ◽  
Current Experiment ◽  
Time Analysis ◽  
Cockpit Display ◽  
Eye Fixations

Several experiments were conducted to examine the effect of brightness highlighting on search of a target aircraft among distractor aircraft within a cockpit display of traffic information (CDTI). The present experiment partially replicated the design of one of these experiments, adding an examination of eye movements. The display presented homogenous all bright, all dim, or mixed bright and dim aircraft. Within the mixed display, target aircraft were non-predictive and either bright or dim. Results showed that with the mixed display, participants yielded slower detection times, exhibited more eye fixations, and searched with longer paths, compared to the homogenous all bright or dim displays. The duration of the fixation and the speed of eye movements did not show any difference between the homogeneous and mixed displays. The present detection time analysis did not replicate previous experimental results and this is likely due to the fewer trials given in the current experiment. The present results demonstrated how using highlighting to segregate information domains may impose costs on visual search performance in the early stages of a search task.

Sex and physiological state influence the rate of resource acquisition and monopolisation in urban free-ranging dogs, Canis familiaris

Behaviour ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 150 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madhur Mangalam ◽  
Mewa Singh
Keyword(s):  
Associative Learning ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Foraging Behaviour ◽  
Physiological State ◽  
Canis Familiaris ◽  
Resource Acquisition ◽  
Extraction Techniques ◽  
Animal Populations ◽  
New Information ◽  
Free Ranging

In animal populations, the constraints of energy and time can cause intraspecific variation in foraging behaviour. The proximate developmental mediators of such variation are often the mechanisms underlying perception and associative learning. Here, experience-dependent changes in foraging behaviour and their consequences were investigated in an urban population of free-ranging dogs, Canis familiaris by continually challenging them with the task of food extraction from specially crafted packets. Typically, males and pregnant/lactating (PL) females extracted food using the sophisticated ‘gap widening’ technique, whereas non-pregnant/non-lactating (NPNL) females, the relatively underdeveloped ‘rip opening’ technique. In contrast to most males and PL females (and a few NPNL females) that repeatedly used the gap widening technique and improved their performance in food extraction with experience, most NPNL females (and a few males and PL females) non-preferentially used the two extraction techniques and did not improve over successive trials. Furthermore, the ability of dogs to sophisticatedly extract food was positively related to their ability to improve their performance with experience. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that factors such as sex and physiological state can cause differences among individuals in the likelihood of learning new information and hence, in the rate of resource acquisition and monopolization.

scholarly journals Eye movements reflect expertise development in hybrid search

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan H. Papesh ◽  
Michael C. Hout ◽  
Juan D. Guevara Pinto ◽  
Arryn Robbins ◽  
Alexis Lopez
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Hybrid Search ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Visual Span ◽  
Change Behavior ◽  
Fixation Probabilities ◽  
Study Participants

AbstractDomain-specific expertise changes the way people perceive, process, and remember information from that domain. This is often observed in visual domains involving skilled searches, such as athletics referees, or professional visual searchers (e.g., security and medical screeners). Although existing research has compared expert to novice performance in visual search, little work has directly documented how accumulating experiences change behavior. A longitudinal approach to studying visual search performance may permit a finer-grained understanding of experience-dependent changes in visual scanning, and the extent to which various cognitive processes are affected by experience. In this study, participants acquired experience by taking part in many experimental sessions over the course of an academic semester. Searchers looked for 20 categories of targets simultaneously (which appeared with unequal frequency), in displays with 0–3 targets present, while having their eye movements recorded. With experience, accuracy increased and response times decreased. Fixation probabilities and durations decreased with increasing experience, but saccade amplitudes and visual span increased. These findings suggest that the behavioral benefits endowed by expertise emerge from oculomotor behaviors that reflect enhanced reliance on memory to guide attention and the ability to process more of the visual field within individual fixations.

Distractor Ratio Influences Patterns of Eye Movements during Visual Search

Perception ◽  
10.1068/p2933 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiye Shen ◽  
Eyal M Reingold ◽  
Marc Pomplun
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Search Task ◽  
Search Model ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Manual Response ◽  
Guided Search ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Conjunctive Search

We examined the flexibility of guidance in a conjunctive search task by manipulating the ratios between different types of distractors. Participants were asked to decide whether a target was present or absent among distractors sharing either colour or shape. Results indicated a strong effect of distractor ratio on search performance. Shorter latency to move, faster manual response, and fewer fixations per trial were observed at extreme distractor ratios. The distribution of saccadic endpoints also varied flexibly as a function of distractor ratio. When there were very few same-colour distractors, the saccadic selectivity was biased towards the colour dimension. In contrast, when most of the distractors shared colour with the target, the saccadic selectivity was biased towards the shape dimension. Results are discussed within the framework of the guided search model.

scholarly journals Evolution of foraging behaviour in response to chronic malnutrition in Drosophila melanogaster

2012 ◽  
Vol 279 (1742) ◽  
pp. 3540-3546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roshan K. Vijendravarma ◽  
Sunitha Narasimha ◽  
Tadeusz J. Kawecki
Keyword(s):  
Path Length ◽  
Foraging Behaviour ◽  
Foraging Strategy ◽  
Complementation Test ◽  
Energetic Efficiency ◽  
Search Behaviour ◽  
Chronic Malnutrition ◽  
Alternative Hypotheses ◽  
The One ◽  
And Control

Chronic exposure to food of low quality may exert conflicting selection pressures on foraging behaviour. On the one hand, more active search behaviour may allow the animal to find patches with slightly better, or more, food; on the other hand, such active foraging is energetically costly, and thus may be opposed by selection for energetic efficiency. Here, we test these alternative hypotheses in Drosophila larvae. We show that populations which experimentally evolved improved tolerance to larval chronic malnutrition have shorter foraging path length than unselected control populations. A behavioural polymorphism in foraging path length (the rover–sitter polymorphism) exists in nature and is attributed to the foraging locus ( for ). We show that a sitter strain ( for s2 ) survives better on the poor food than the rover strain ( for R ), confirming that the sitter foraging strategy is advantageous under malnutrition. Larvae of the selected and control populations did not differ in global for expression. However, a quantitative complementation test suggests that the for locus may have contributed to the adaptation to poor food in one of the selected populations, either through a change in for allele frequencies, or by interacting epistatically with alleles at other loci. Irrespective of its genetic basis, our results provide two independent lines of evidence that sitter-like foraging behaviour is favoured under chronic larval malnutrition.

scholarly journals Mind-Wandering: What Can We Learn from Eye Movements?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Han Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Scene Perception ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Irrelevant Distractors

Mind-wandering (MW) is ubiquitous and is associated with reduced performance across a wide range of tasks. Recent studies have shown that MW can be related to changes in gaze parameters. In this dissertation, I explored the link between eye movements and MW in three different contexts that involve complex cognitive processing: visual search, scene perception, and reading comprehension. Study 1 examined how MW affects visual search performance, particularly the ability to suppress salient but irrelevant distractors during visual search. Study 2 used a scene encoding task to study how MW affects how eye movements change over time and their relationship with scene content. Study 3 examined how MW affects readers’ ability to detect semantic incongruities in the text and make necessary revisions of their understanding as they read jokes. All three studies showed that MW was associated with decreased task performance at the behavioral level (e.g., response time, recognition, and recall). Eye-tracking further showed that these behavioral costs can be traced to deficits in specific cognitive processes. The final chapter of this dissertation explored whether there are context-independent eye movement features of MW. MW manifests itself in different ways depending on task characteristics. In tasks that require extensive sampling of the stimuli (e.g., reading and scene viewing), MW was related to a global reduction in visual processing. But this was not the case for the search task, which involved speeded, simple visual processing. MW was instead related to increased looking time on the target after it was already located. MW affects the coupling between cognitive efforts and task demands, but the nature of this decoupling depends on the specific features of particular tasks.

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