Part of the Bristol and Bath Psychology seminar series jointly hosted by both the School of Psychological Science and the Department of Psychology, respectively.
Abstract: The talk will give a tour of Guided Search 6.0 (GS6), the latest evolution of the Guided Search model of visual search. Part 1 concerns The Mechanics of Search. Because we cannot recognize more than a few items at a time, selective attention is used to prioritize items for processing. Selective attention to an item allows its features to be bound together into a representation that can be matched to a target template in memory or rejected as a distractor. The binding and recognition of an attended object is modeled as a diffusion process taking > 150 msec/item. Since selection occurs more frequently than an ever 150 msec, it follows that multiple items must be undergoing recognition at the same time, probably asynchronously. This makes GS6 a hybrid serial and parallel model. Part 2 describes five sources of Guidance. These are combined into a spatial “priority map” that is used to guide the deployment of attention (hence “guided search”). The five are: (1) top-down and (2) bottom-up feature guidance, (3) prior history (e.g. priming), (4) reward, and (5) scene syntax and semantics. Finally, in Part 3, we will consider the internal representation of what we are searching for; what is often called “the search template”. That search template is really two templates: a guiding template (probably in working memory) and a target template (in long term memory). Put these pieces together and you have GS6. Lots of details can be found in Wolfe, J. M. (2021). Guided Search 6.0: An updated model of visual search. Psych Bulletin & Review, 28, 1060–1092. doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01859-9
Bio: Jeremy Wolfe is Professor of Ophthalmology and Radiology at Harvard Medical School. He runs the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. With expertise in vision and visual attention, his research focuses on visual search with a particular interest in socially important search tasks in areas such as medical image perception. He is founding editor of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.