Journal article
Prospective search time estimates reveal the strengths and limits of internal models of visual search
- Abstract:
- Having an internal model of one's attention can be useful for effectively managing limited perceptual and cognitive resources. While previous work has hinted at the existence of an internal model of attention, it is still unknown how rich and flexible this model is, whether it corresponds to one's own attention or to a generic person-invariant schema, and whether it is specified as a list of facts and rules or alternatively as a probabilistic simulation model. To this end, we tested participants' ability to estimate their own behavior in a visual search task with novel displays. In six online experiments (four pre-registered), prospective search time estimates reflected accurate metacognitive knowledge of key findings in the visual search literature, including the set-size effect, higher efficiency of color over conjunction search, and the asymmetric contributions of target and distractor identities to search difficulty. In contrast, estimates were biased to assume serial search, and demonstrated little to no insight into sizeable effects of search asymmetries for basic visual features, and of target-distractor similarity. Together, our findings reveal a complex picture, where internal models of visual search are sensitive to some, but not all, of the factors that make some searches more difficult than others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 4.8MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1037/xge0001360
Authors
+ Wellcome Trust
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- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/029chgv08
- Grant:
- 203147/Z/16/
- Publisher:
- American Psychological Association
- Journal:
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General More from this journal
- Volume:
- 152
- Issue:
- 7
- Pages:
- 1951-1966
- Place of publication:
- United States
- Publication date:
- 2023-03-20
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-12-13
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1939-2222
- ISSN:
-
0096-3445
- Pmid:
-
36939608
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1573882
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1573882
- Deposit date:
-
2024-10-02
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Mazor et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © 2023 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format, as well as adapting the material for any purpose, even commercially.
- Notes:
-
For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public
copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from
this submission.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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