Does Previewing One Stimulus Feature Help Conjunction Search?

Abstract

We examined the effects of previewing one aspect of a search display, in order to determine what subset of display information is most useful as a prelude to a search task. Observers were asked to indicate the presence or absence of a known target, in a conjunction search where the target was defined by the combination of colour and orientation (a yellow horizontal line presented among yellow vertical and pink horizontal distractors). In the colour preview condition of experiment 1, observers were first shown a 1 s preview of the locations and colours of the search items before the actual search set was presented. That is, search items first appeared as yellow and pink squares for 1 s, which each then turned into yellow and pink oriented lines (in the same locations) which comprised the display to be searched. In the orientation preview condition, observers were first shown a 1 s preview of the locations and orientations of the search items before the actual search display was presented. These two conditions were compared to a control condition consisting of standard conjunction search without any preview display. There was no effect of colour preview; there was a marginal effect of orientation preview, but in the opposite direction from what was expected reaction time increased for orientation preview searches. In experiment 2 these previews were compared to two spatial cueing conditions; in this experiment the colour preview did provide a small amount of help. Finally, in experiment 3 both previews were presented in succession, and increased facilitation was found, in particular when the colour preview preceded the orientation preview. These findings are discussed in relation to the literature, in particular the Guided Search model (Wolfe et al 1989 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 15 419-433; Wolfe 1994 Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 1 202-238).

Reference Production as Search: The Impact of Domain Size on the Production of Distinguishing Descriptions

“…Reali, Spivey, Tyler, and Terranova (2006) provided further confirmation by replicating the findings of Spivey et al (2001), while also showing that the order in which information is delivered matters: Describing the target using color followed by orientation facilitated search more than did the opposite order. This echoes findings by Olds and Fockler (2004), who found a similar order effect using visual preview of stimuli. Crucially, Reali et al (2006)'s design excludes the possibility that linguistic guidance effects are an artefact of blocked designs, or that they are due to an odd-one-out search strategy.…”

“…Faster versus slower search is known to be affected by a variety of factors, including, among others, the extent to which a display affords the formation of perceptual groups (He & Nakayama, 1995;Nakayama & Joseph, 1998;Nakayama & Silverman, 1986;Nordfang & Wolfe, 2014); the salience of individual features that are reliably correlated with a conjunction (Found, 1998;Sobel & Cave, 2002;Wolfe, Cave, & Franzel, 1989); and the similarity between target and distractors, as well as the specificity of the template (Duncan & Humphreys, 1989;Malcolm & Henderson, 2009). Guidance (Olds, Cowan, & Jolicoeur, 2000a,b,c) or preview of features in a target conjunction (Olds & Fockler, 2004) also facilitates search for complex targets. Palmer, 1994Palmer, , 1995Vickery, King, & Jiang, 2005); and by the search strategy afforded by the display (e.g., the presence of subsets; cf.…”

“…Guidance (Olds, Cowan, & Jolicoeur, 2000a,b,c) or preview of features in a target conjunction (Olds & Fockler, 2004) also facilitates search for complex targets. This echoes findings by Olds and Fockler (2004), who found a similar order effect using visual preview of stimuli. Spivey, Tyler, Eberhard, and Tanenhaus (2001) showed that auditory presentation of a target template or description, incrementally and concurrently with the display, results in shallower RT 9 set size slopes (though it has been argued that this form of linguistic guidance is dependent on the speech rate with which the description of the target is delivered; Gibson, Eberhard, & Bryant, 2005).…”

Inefficient conjunction search made efficient by concurrent spoken delivery of target identity

“…This asymmetry is consistent with the preferred order of feature type delivery observed in other studies. For example, Olds and Fockler (2004) conducted purely visual experiments with no linguistic input in which they found greater search assistance from single-feature previews that primed color first and then orientation than from those that primed orientation first and then color, suggesting that the cause of the asymmetry may reside in visual discrimination or localization of color versus visual discrimination or localization of orientation. Moreover, Boucart and Humphreys (1997) reported that in a matching task attention could be efficiently applied to color without influence from semantic information regarding the objects, but semantic information did interfere with attention to orientation.…”

A framework for comparing task performance in real and virtual scenes

“…Examining practices such as priming through previewing various aspects of objects would also be interesting. For example, Olds and Fockler [2004] compare the previewing of color and orientation, and show that conjunction previewing is most effective. Furthermore, Watson et al [2003] demonstrated that, with previewing, more delay can be tolerated even when the task is difficult.…”