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Contrasting Gist-Based and Template-Based Guidance During Real-World Visual Search
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Contrasting Gist-Based and Template-Based Guidance During Real-World Visual Search

Brett Bahle, Michi Matsukura and Andrew Hollingworth
Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, Vol.44(3), pp.367-386
03/2018
DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000468
PMCID: PMC5809241
PMID: 28795834

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Abstract

Visual search through real-world scenes is guided both by a representation of target features and by knowledge of the sematic properties of the scene (derived from scene gist recognition). In 3 experiments, we compared the relative roles of these 2 sources of guidance. Participants searched for a target object in the presence of a critical distractor object. The color of the critical distractor either matched or mismatched (a) the color of an item maintained in visual working memory for a secondary task (Experiment 1), or (b) the color of the target, cued by a picture before search commenced (Experiments 2 and 3). Capture of gaze by a matching distractor served as an index of template guidance. There were 4 main findings: (a) The distractor match effect was observed from the first saccade on the scene, (b) it was independent of the availability of scene-level gist-based guidance, (c) it was independent of whether the distractor appeared in a plausible location for the target, and (d) it was preserved even when gist-based guidance was available before scene onset. Moreover, gist-based, semantic guidance of gaze to target-plausible regions of the scene was delayed relative to template-based guidance. These results suggest that feature-based template guidance is not limited to plausible scene regions after an initial, scene-level analysis. Public Significance Statement Many tasks in our modern world are visual search tasks, such as baggage screeners looking for dangerous items or radiologists looking for tumors. The present study aids in understanding how real-world searches of this sort are performed and can be optimized. In real-world contexts, searchers use the visual properties of target objects and knowledge of where these objects are likely to be located. The findings from the present study expand our understanding of the relationship between these 2 sources of guidance.
 visual attention eye movements visual search attentional guidance

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