Metacognitive contributions to search termination
Year: 2020
Type: preprint
Abstract: When searching for a target object among distractors, a robust finding in cognitive science is that search time varies as a function of the number of distractors and their similarity to the target object. This is true not only for the time taken to say a target is present, but also for the time taken to terminate a search and conclude that a target object is absent. However, while models of visual search have successfully characterized perceptual and cognitive contributions to target detection, the mechanisms underpinning when to terminate a search and conclude that a target is absent are poorly understood. In other words, when do people decide to give up and conclude that nothing is there? By focusing on the first few trials of a visual search task, in Experiment 1 we found that participants had expectations about the pop-out of color prior to engaging with the task, as evidenced by a first trial pop-out effect for color-absence. In Experiment 2, we ask if the same is true for another visual dimension, shape. In this second Experiment we also include a debriefing questionnaire, designed to rule out prior experience with similar visual search experiments in the past as a potential explanation of our results, and to measure explicit metacognitive access to attention-guiding knowledge.
Authors: Fleming, Stephen, Mazor, Matan
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3206920708