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    Visual Search Task

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    Anett Szabó
    This lab report describes a visual search task experiment conducted with 19 psychology students. The task involved searching for an orange letter "T" target among distractors that varied in number (5, 10, 15, or 20 items) and pressing a button when the target was found. Reaction times increased with the number of distractors, supporting the hypothesis that more distractors make the visual search task harder. Limitations included uneven spacing of target and no-target trials. The results are consistent with theories that visual search requires serial rather than parallel processing when distinguishing similar objects.

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    Visual Search Task

    Uploaded by

    Anett Szabó
    48 views3 pages
    This lab report describes a visual search task experiment conducted with 19 psychology students. The task involved searching for an orange letter "T" target among distractors that varied in number (5, 10, 15, or 20 items) and pressing a button when the target was found. Reaction times increased with the number of distractors, supporting the hypothesis that more distractors make the visual search task harder. Limitations included uneven spacing of target and no-target trials. The results are consistent with theories that visual search requires serial rather than parallel processing when distinguishing similar objects.

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    This lab report describes a visual search task experiment conducted with 19 psychology students. The task involved searching for an orange letter "T" target among distractors that varied in number (5, 10, 15, or 20 items) and pressing a button when the target was found. Reaction times increased with the number of distractors, supporting the hypothesis that more distractors make the visual search task harder. Limitations included uneven spacing of target and no-target trials. The results are consistent with theories that visual search requires serial rather than parallel processing when distinguishing similar objects.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    48 views3 pages

    Visual Search Task

    Uploaded by

    Anett Szabó
    This lab report describes a visual search task experiment conducted with 19 psychology students. The task involved searching for an orange letter "T" target among distractors that varied in number (5, 10, 15, or 20 items) and pressing a button when the target was found. Reaction times increased with the number of distractors, supporting the hypothesis that more distractors make the visual search task harder. Limitations included uneven spacing of target and no-target trials. The results are consistent with theories that visual search requires serial rather than parallel processing when distinguishing similar objects.

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    Lab report – Visual Search task

    Szabó Anett Zsuzsanna (EEMRDO)

    Introduction

    Visual search is the task of looking for something in a crowded visual environment
    (Wolfe & Horowitz, 2008). In the literature, the item the participant is looking for is
    termed target. All other stimuli are termed as distractors.

    One of the earliest studies in searching for items (A. Treisman, 1977) offers the idea that
    when the observer is looking for specific features among several similar objects the more
    items there are, the longer the required time is. It is explained by that the searching
    cannot be done in parallel, only with serial processing.

    The feature-integration theory’s suggestion it that in an environment where there are


    unitary objects, we become aware of them in two different ways: either through focal
    attention, or through top-down processing (A. M. Treisman & Gelade, 1980). In
    customary conditions the two routes are not separated and work together to identify
    objects or in our case the targets. However, in extreme conditions, such as in an
    experimental situation we might be able to separate them.

    There is a large variety of visual search tasks designed to measure the correlation
    between one’s required time to find the target and the number of distractors. The one
    we have used is designed to do exactly that.

    We expect cognitively healthy participants to have an extended reaction time when there
    are more distractors around the target than when there are less.

    Methods

    Participants. The task was administered on 19 participants (sex and exact age
    unknown) from the population of Ba psychology students at Eötvös Loránd University.

    Materials and Procedure. We used the PsyToolkit version of the Visual Search task
    (Visual Search Task, n.d.).
    In the task, participants were presented with 50 search displays. In each display there
    were 5, 10, 15 or 20 items. The participant’s job was to find the target which was an
    upright positioned and orange colored letter “T” and to press the space bar as quickly as
    possible. There were some trials where there was no target present on the screen. In this
    case the task was to not press anything and to wait for the next picture to appear.

    The task took around 5 minutes to complete. There was no practice phase or break
    during the task.

    Results

    We observed differences in selecting targets by the number of distractors presented on


    the screen (Figure 1.). The mean of reaction times can be calculated to show the
    pertinence of our hypothesis.

    Figure 1. The mean of each participant’s reaction time based on the number of
    distractors the participants must ignore to complete the task correctly.
    Discussion

    The results are in line with our expectations. The participants’ reaction time extended
    depending on the number of items presented on the screen. We have not made
    statistical tests; however, these results are promising in showing that the higher the
    number of distractors is the more time one’s require to find the target (to differentiate
    between similar-looking objects).

    The experiment had some limitations. For instance, based on the participants feedback
    the “target” and “no-target” conditions were not evenly spaced, thus, the participants
    became bored and more inattentive while completing the task. In further studies, it
    would be ideal to put more emphasis on the spacing of stimuli.

    References

    Treisman, A. (1977). Focused attention in the perception and retrieval of

    multidimensional stimuli. Perception & Psychophysics, 22(1), 1–11.

    https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206074

    Treisman, A. M., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention.

    Cognitive Psychology, 12(1), 97–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-

    0285(80)90005-5

    Visual search task. (n.d.). Retrieved October 25, 2023, from

    https://www.psytoolkit.org/experiment-library/search.html

    Wolfe, J., & Horowitz, T. S. (2008). Visual search. Scholarpedia, 3(7), 3325.

    https://doi.org/10.4249/scholarpedia.3325

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