Learned oculomotor avoidance during strong target guidance

Imagine searching for a ketchup bottle in a refrigerator. If the refrigerator is quite full, search for the ketchup bottle might be quite difficult. To efficiently guide visual attention within this scene, the visual system would have to ignore potential distractors (e.g., other condiments such as yellow mustard, or green relish) and restrict focus toward items that share defining features with the ketchup bottle – the color red. However, people have a lifetime of experience performing visual searches and searching for a blue condiment is rarely ever performed; therefore, another strong source of guiding search is to avoid consistently distracting items. In one set of experiments, participants searched through displays with two colors – one target color and one distractor color – allowing me to test and subsequently demonstrate that people can simultaneously search for a specific color while ignoring one that is always irrelevant.

Next, I tested how the visual system achieves efficient visual search by examining the eyes’ orienting behavior. I tested between two plausible ways people could direct their eye gaze during search: One where the eyes avoid looking at the distractors whenever possible and the other where the eyes search out and quickly “mark” the distractors as things to avoid. I found that humans adopt the strategy of “avoid distracting information whenever possible, but if distractors are looked at, try and look elsewhere as quickly as possible.” In sum, the present experiments inform the basic scientific question about what determines how we visually search for items.