Guidance of eye movements during conjunctive visual search: the distractor-ratio effect.

Full Abstract

The distractor-ratio effect refers to the finding that search performance in a conjunctive visual search task depends on the relative frequency of two types or subsets of distractors when the total number of items in a display is fixed. Previously, Shen, Reingold, and Pomplun (2000) examined participants' patterns of eye movements in a distractor-ratio paradigm and demonstrated that on any given trial saccadic endpoints were biased towards the smaller subset of distractors and participants flexibly switched between different subsets across trials. The current study explored the boundary conditions of this tendency to flexibly search through a smaller subset of distractors by examining the influence of several manipulations known to modulate search efficiency, including stimulus discriminability (Experiment 1), within-dimension versus cross-dimension conjunction search and distractor heterogeneity (Experiment 2). The results indicated that the flexibility of visual guidance and saccadic bias exemplified by the distractor-ratio effect is a robust phenomenon that mediates search efficiency by adapting to changes in the relative informativeness of stimulus dimensions and features.

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Author information

Author/s: Shen, Jiye (J); Reingold, Eyal M (EM); Pomplun, Marc (M);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Ontario. jiye@psych.utoronto.ca

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale (Can J Exp Psychol), published in Canada. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Jun; vol 57 (issue 2) : pp 76-96

Dates: Created 2003/06/25; Completed 2003/08/04; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12822838, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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