Similarity and heterogeneity effects in visual search are mediated by “segmentability”

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 2016. Vol. 42. No. 7. P. 995–1007.

Utochkin I. S., Yurevich M.

The heterogeneity of our visual environment typically reduces the speed with which a singleton target can be found. Visual search theories explain this via nontarget similarities and dissimilarities that affect grouping, perceptual noise, etc. Here, we show that increasing the heterogeneity of a display can facilitate rather than inhibit visual search for size and orientation singletons when heterogeneous features smoothly fill the transition between highly distinguishable nontargets. We suggest that this smooth transition reduce the “segmentability” of dissimilar items to otherwise separate subsets making the visual system to treat them as a near-homogenous sets opposing to a singleton.

Keywords: attention, segmentation, visual search, ensemble summary statistics, similarity

Publication based on the results of: Psychological mechanisms of formation of cognitive representations (2014)