The role of memory for visual search in scenes
Abstract
Many daily activities involve looking for something. The ease with which these searches are performed often allows one to forget that searching represents complex interactions between visual attention and memory. Although a clear understanding exists of how search efficiency will be influenced by visual features of targets and their surrounding distractors or by the number of items in the display, the role of memory in search is less well understood. Contextual cueing studies have shown that implicit memory for repeated item configurations can facilitate search in artificial displays. When searching more naturalistic environments, other forms of memory come into play. For instance, semantic memory provides useful information about which objects are typically found where within a scene, and episodic scene memory provides information about where a particular object was seen the last time a particular scene was viewed. In this paper, we will review work on these topics, with special emphasis on the role of memory in guiding search in organized, real‐world scenes.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Feb 12, 2015
- Source ID
- 10.1111/nyas.12667
Entities
People
- Jeremy M. Wolfe
- Melissa Le‐hoa Võ
Organizations
- German Research Foundation
- Goethe University Frankfurt
- Harvard Medical School
- National Institutes of Health
- Office of Naval Research