Predicting visual search performance by quantifying stimuli similarities

Avraham, Tamar; Yeshurun, Yaffa; Lindenbaum, Michael

doi:10.1167/8.4.9

Cited by 27 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 56 publications

(94 reference statements)

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“…Knowledge of the physical properties of the distractors present in the displays and the visual attributes that distinguish them from the target can improve search performance. Conversely, distractor heterogeneity will typically degrade search accuracy (Avraham, Yeshurun, & Lindenbaum, 2008;Duncan & Humphreys, 1989;Nagy, Neriani, & Young, 2005;Rosenholtz, 2001; but see Nagy & Thomas, 2003;Vincent, Baddeley, Troscianko, & Gilchrist, 2009 for exceptions). Rosenholtz (2001) showed that adding distractor variability by replacing a subset of distractors with new distractors that are more discriminable from the target still degraded search performance.…”

Section: Knowledge Of Distractors and Noise Statistical Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual search: A retrospective

2011

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Visual search, a vital task for humans and animals, has also become a common and important tool for studying many topics central to active vision and cognition ranging from spatial vision, attention, and oculomotor control to memory, decision making, and rewards. While visual search often seems effortless to humans, trying to recreate human visual search abilities in machines has represented an incredible challenge for computer scientists and engineers. What are the brain computations that ensure successful search? This review article draws on efforts from various subfields and discusses the mechanisms and strategies the brain uses to optimize visual search: the psychophysical evidence, their neural correlates, and if unknown, possible loci of the neural computations. Mechanisms and strategies include use of knowledge about the target, distractor, background statistical properties, location probabilities, contextual cues, scene context, rewards, target prevalence, and also the role of saliency, center-surround organization of search templates, and eye movement plans. I provide overviews of classic and contemporary theories of covert attention and eye movements during search explaining their differences and similarities. To allow the reader to anchor some of the laboratory findings to real-world tasks, the article includes interviews with three expert searchers: a radiologist, a fisherman, and a satellite image analyst.

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Section: Knowledge Of Distractors and Noise Statistical Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual search: A retrospective

2011

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“…Indeed, our technique could be used to study bottom-up saliency, for instance, by controlling how similar a set of distractors are to one another (thereby making distractor arrays that are more or less homogeneous; cf. Duncan & Humphreys, 1989; Avraham, Yeshurun, & Lindenbaum, 2008). Alternatively, it could be used to study top-down attention, as in the Hout & Goldinger (2015) study wherein we manipulated the visual similarity between the target image a searcher experienced and their mental representation of that item derived from a somewhat different looking cue (Zelinsky, 2008, for a computational approach to studying mental representations).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The data took the form of an exponential relationship between the pigeon’s ability to detect a target, and that target’s similarity to the distractors that surrounded it, such that increased target-distractor similarity resulted in slower target pecking behavior. In addition, Avraham, Yeshurun, and Lindenbaum (2008) predicted human search performance from distractor homogeneity and target-distractor similarity using computational modeling.…”

Section: Visual Search and Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Using multidimensional scaling to quantify similarity in visual search and beyond

Hout

Godwin

Fitzsimmons

et al. 2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Visual search is one of the most widely studied topics in vision science, both as an independent topic of interest, and as a tool for studying attention and visual cognition. A wide literature exists that seeks to understand how people find things under varying conditions of difficulty and complexity, and in situations ranging from the mundane (e.g., looking for one’s keys) to those with significant societal importance (e.g., baggage or medical screening). A primary determinant of the ease and probability of success during search are the similarity relationships that exist in the search environment, such as the similarity between the background and the target, or the likeness of the non-targets to one another. A sense of similarity is often intuitive, but it is seldom quantified directly. This presents a problem in that similarity relationships are imprecisely specified, limiting the capacity of the researcher to examine adequately their influence. In this article, we present a novel approach to overcoming this problem that combines multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses with behavioral and eye-tracking measurements. We propose a method whereby MDS can be repurposed to successfully quantify the similarity of experimental stimuli, thereby opening up theoretical questions in visual search and attention that cannot currently be addressed. These quantifications, in conjunction with behavioral and oculomotor measures, allow for critical observations about how similarity affects performance, information selection, and information processing. We provide a demonstration and tutorial of the approach, identify documented examples of its use, discuss how complementary computer vision methods could also be adopted, and close with a discussion of potential avenues for future application of this technique.

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“…In particular, it is well known that both the difference between the targets and distractors (e.g., Avraham, Yeshurun, Lindenbaum, 2008;Pashler, 1987) and the heterogeneity of the distractors play an important role in visual search (Duncan & Humphreys, 1989). In fact, distractors play a complicated role in search, both because they affect the target templates that are available to participants and because rejecting distractors may be easiest if they are homogenous.…”

Section: The Role Of Distractors In Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Target Templates in Low Target-Distractor Discriminability Visual Search Have Higher Resolution, but the Advantage They Provide is Short-lived

Lau¹,

Pashler²,

Brady³

2019

Preprint

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When you search repeatedly for a set of items among very similar distractors, does that make you more efficient in locating the targets? To address this, we had observers search for two categories of targets among the same set of distractors across trials. After a few blocks of trials, the distractor set was replaced. In two experiments, we manipulated the level of discriminability between the targets and distractors before and after the distractors were replaced. Our results suggest that in the presence of repeated distractors, observers generally become more efficient. However, the difficulty of the search task does impact how efficient people are when the distractor set is replaced. Specifically, when the training is easy, people are more impaired in a difficult transfer test. We attribute this effect to the precision of the target template generated during training. In particular, a coarse target template is created when the target and distractors are easy to discriminate. These coarse target templates do not transfer well in a context with new distractors. This suggests that learning with more distinct targets and distractors can result in lower performance when context changes, but observers recover from this effect quickly (within a block of search trials).

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Predicting visual search performance by quantifying stimuli similarities

Cited by 27 publications

References 56 publications

Visual search: A retrospective

Visual search: A retrospective

Using multidimensional scaling to quantify similarity in visual search and beyond

Target Templates in Low Target-Distractor Discriminability Visual Search Have Higher Resolution, but the Advantage They Provide is Short-lived

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