Dynamic Modeling of Visual Search

In 1998/1999 three participants trained for up to 74 hour long sessions to find a target present on half the trials in visual displays of 1, 2, or 4 initially novel objects. There were four targets and four foils that never changed. Displays occurred simultaneously, or the objects occurred successively, or the four features of each object occurred successively. When successive, the SOAs were short (17, 33, or 50 ms) so the displays appeared simultaneous, making it likely that the search strategy was the same in all conditions. A 2004 publication examined only the simultaneous condition and found evidence for serial search as well as some small amount of automatic attention to targets, and occasional early or late termination of search. A 2021 publication examined only the displays with single objects, obtaining evidence for dynamic perception of features. Here we present a simple dynamic model that explains the main processes operating in our task: It is based on serial terminating search. One participant always searched in random order; the two others sometimes started search with the first object presented. notReviewed other