Visual Search Task
Course code: PSY310
Course name: Lab in Psychology
Date: 10th October 2024
Name of the student: Trusha Shah
Enrollment no.: AU23L20001
GitHub link:
[Link]
search%20experiment
Visual Search Task
Lab Report
Introduction
If the visual search identifies the distribution of attention to multiple locations, it determines how
people pay attention to several stimuli in the presence of distractions. When watching how
people scan for a target through distracters, one is able to see how attention is divided, how it
moves from one object to the next one, or what enhances or inhibits searching. Visual search
tasks enable us to compare both the selective attention where specific stimuli receive priority and
divided attention in which stimuli contend for resources and time (Treisman & Gelade, 1980).
According to the type of attention used in visual search, the efficiency varies in equal proportion.
In “feature search”, where the target is defined distinctively by one feature from that of the
distractors, the search is very rapid and smooth. On the other hand, conjunction search involves
feature integration and takes time and relies on limited attention. This difference is captured by
reaction times (RTs); feature search has shallow search slopes while conjunction search has steep
slopes and implies high attentional demand.
Method
Participant- The experiment involved an undergraduate student enrolled at Ahmedabad
University. The participant’s consent was obtained and was briefed and informed about the
details of the experiment. The participant's eyesight was normal or corrected to normal,
indicating that any effects weren't the result of visual impairments.
Materials and Procedure- The experimental setup was made using PsychoPy (v2024.1.5) in a
quiet room. Participants sat in front of a computer screen in the room. In this experiment,
participants were given a visual search paradigm accompanied with a procedure in which the
goal was to find a target stimulus among distracters. The target for the search operation could be
dissimilar in one attribute (feature search) or in an assortment of attributes (junction search). Two
set sizes (five and ten items) to investigate how the number of distracers impacts on reaction time
was developed. Target presentation consisted of asking participants press a key as fast and
errorless as possible upon target detection. The task was the response time and accuracy to
establish the ways of the attention allocation when it comes to searching. In the experiment, 200
random trials were conducted.
Results
Mean RT for set size 5: 1.87 seconds
Mean RT for set size 10: 2.11 seconds
The slope of the line connecting these two points is 0.048. This indicates that as the set size
increases from 5 to 10, the reaction time increases by approximately 0.048 seconds per unit
increase in set size.
Discussion
The steepness of the RT by set size function is an index of the attentional costs required for
performing visual search tasks. As the slope increases one cannot easily manage to handle more
distraction which is a clear indication of a difficult search. In feature searches the slope is usually
near zero which means that attention is not heavily taxed. Conjunction searches exhibit steeper
slopes, as compared with other types of searches, because more effort and attention is required to
combine features (Wolfe, 1994).
This additional seven milliseconds of increase in set size per item is typical of how attentional
load rises in the visual search. This has been observed in feature search experiments because,
here, the target is always easy to distinguish from all the other related distracters, and
consequently, the slope is normally less steep. However, the conjunction search paradigm applied
here does involve feature binding and integration, which results from the necessity to attend to
numerous components at the same time, thereby leading to steeper RT trends (Wolfe, 1994). The
findings of this experiment concur with other research done earlier which ratify that the reaction
time rises when more distractors are present (Treisman & Gelade, 1980).
The further away distance on the RT with set size indicates that participants have to exert more
effort in order to find the target as the number of items on the screen increases. This is especially
the case in real-life activities, for example, air traffic control, or practicing medicine, where
distractions are inevitable: the ability to quickly home in on valuable knowledge is crucial. The
obtained slope knowledge underlines the relationship between the visual search task demands
and attentional resources answering for further analysis of the role of attention in processing of
the complex visual backgrounds.
References
Treisman, A., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive
Psychology, 12(1), 97–136. [Link]
Wolfe, J. M. (1994). Guided Search 2.0: A revised model of visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin
& Review, 1(2), 202–238. [Link]