Looking leads gaze to objects; seeing recognizes them. Visual crowding makes seeing difficult or impossible before looking brings objects to the fovea. Looking before seeing can be guided by saliency mechanisms in the primary visual cortex (V1). We have proposed that looking and seeing are mainly supported by peripheral and central vision, respectively. This proposal is tested in an observer with central vision loss due to macular degeneration, using a visual search task that can be accomplished solely through looking, but is actually impeded through seeing. The search target is an uniquely oriented, salient, bar among identically shaped bars. Each bar, including the target, is part of an \" \" X \" shape. The target\'s \" X is identical to, although rotated from, the other \" X \'s in the image, which normally causes confusion. However, this observer exhibits no such confusion, presumably because she cannot see the \" X \'s shape, but can look towards the target. This result demonstrates a critical dichotomy between central and peripheral vision.

OBJECTIVE: Perimenopausal insomnia (PMI) is associated with observable performance impairments in visual search tasks. This study examines how various cognitive processing stages contribute to search performance delays in PMI compared to healthy controls (HCs).
METHODS: We recruited 76 participants diagnosed with PMI and 63 HCs. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as participants engaged in a visual search task, reporting the orientation of a color popout target within an array of ellipses. We analyzed group differences in behavioral performance and ERP components across cognitive processing stages.
RESULTS: Compared to HCs, PMI patients exhibited behavioral response delays, although accuracy was not different between groups. Electrophysiological analyses revealed group differences across several ERP components. Firstly, the N1 component\'s amplitude increased bilaterally, suggesting enhanced visual sensory processing. Secondly, a slower and smaller N2pc indicated reduced attentional orienting. Thirdly, a decreased SPCN amplitude pointed to deficits in target discrimination. Fourthly, an increased amplitude of the stimulus-locked LRP, with unchanged latency, suggested heightened neural inputs for maintaining motor initiation speed. Fifthly, prolonged response-locked LRP latency indicated slower motor execution. Finally, these changes in ERP components, along with significant correlations between LRP components and insomnia symptoms, suggest potential neural biomarkers for PMI.
CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide high-temporal-resolution insights into the neurocognitive disruptions associated with PMI, highlighting how sleep disturbances affect cognitive processing in visual tasks. These insights enhance our understanding of PMI and contribute to discussions on neural mechanisms driving behavioral performance in various conditions.

UNASSIGNED: Conducting Visual Display Terminal (VDT) visual search tasks under time constraint has broad applications in fields such as security checks, medical diagnostics, and rescue operations. While excessive time pressure can impair performance, moderate time pressure can motivate individuals to complete tasks and increase productivity. Investigating the positive impact of time pressure on visual search tasks has become a crucial area of study. Clock timing plays a vital role in the visual interface, influencing the perception of time pressure and impacting visual search performance. However, existing research has paid little attention to the induction of time pressure and the impact of clock timing in VDT visual interfaces on visual search performance. Hence, the objective of this study is to investigate the impact of clock timing on VDT visual search performance under time constraint.
UNASSIGNED: The content of the experimental tasks was determined through a pilot experiment. The formal experiment was conducted in two phases over six sessions. Participants were tasked with locating the letter \"E\" embedded within the distractor letter \"F,\" displayed with a clock area above the interface. The first phase of experiments included conditions of no clock, 4-min clock timing, and 4-min countdown clock timing. In the second phase of the experiment, the clock display method was a countdown clock, with three experiments conducted featuring long time, medium time, and short time. Search speed and accuracy were used as primary performance evaluation metrics to examine the impact of clock timing methods and duration on visual search performance. Twenty-one undergraduate students participated in the formal experiment.
UNASSIGNED: In the first phase of experiments, participants demonstrated significantly faster reaction times (RTs) in tasks where a clock display was present compared to tasks without (ANOVA, F(2, 60) = 4.588, P = 0.014). However, there were no significant differences in accuracy rates across different timing conditions (ANOVA, F(2, 60) = 0.146, P = 0.865), and no significant correlation between RTs and accuracy was found (Kendall\'s R = 0.11, P = 0.914). During the second phase, RTs decreased significantly as time constraints became more stringent (ANOVA, F(2, 60) = 7.564, P < 0.05). Conversely, accuracy rates decreased significantly under shorter time constraints (ANOVA, F(2, 60) = 4.315, P < 0.05), with a negative correlation observed between RTs and accuracy (Kendall\'s R = 0.220, P < 0.01).
UNASSIGNED: Compared to conditions without clock displays, having clock displays significantly improved the speed of the visual search task, although the difference in accuracy was not statistically significant. In the context of shorter clock countdown limits, Shorter timing constraints resulted in faster search speeds but also led to reduced accuracy and increased fatigue. Overall, a correlation exists between search speed and accuracy in visual tasks, where higher speed often correlates with lower accuracy. These findings provide valuable insights into clock timing design for visual search interfaces under time pressure.

People often choose suboptimal attentional control strategies during visual search. This has been at least partially attributed to the avoidance of the cognitive effort associated with the optimal strategy, but aspects of the task triggering such avoidance remain unclear. Here, we attempted to measure effort avoidance of an isolated task component to assess whether this component might drive suboptimal behavior. We adopted a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to measure people\'s visual search strategies. To perform optimally, participants must make a numerosity judgment-estimating and comparing two color sets-before they can advantageously search through the less numerous of the two. If participants skip the numerosity judgment step, they can still perform accurately, albeit substantially more slowly. To study whether effort associated with performing the optional numerosity judgment could be an obstacle to optimal performance, we created a variant of the demand selection task to quantify the avoidance of numerosity judgment effort. Results revealed a robust avoidance of the numerosity judgment, offering a potential explanation for why individuals choose suboptimal strategies in the ACVS task. Nevertheless, we did not find a significant relationship between individual numerosity judgment avoidance and ACVS optimality, and we discussed potential reasons for this lack of an observed relationship. Altogether, our results showed that the effort avoidance for specific subcomponents of a visual search task can be probed and linked to overall strategy choices.

Prior research on task switching has shown that the reconfiguration of stimulus-response mappings across trials is associated with behavioral switch costs. Here, we investigated the effects of switching representations of target-defining features in visual search (attentional templates). Participants searched for one of two color-defined target objects that changed predictably every two trials (Experiment 1) or every four trials (Experiment 2). Substantial costs were observed for search performance on target switch relative to target repeat trials. Preparatory target template activation processes were tracked by measuring N2pc components (indicative of attentional capture) to a rapid series of task-irrelevant color singleton probes that appeared during the interval between search displays, and either matched the currently relevant or the other target color. N2pcs to relevant target color probes emerged from 800 ms before search display onset on target repetition trials, reflecting the activation of a corresponding color template. Crucially, probe N2pcs only emerged immediately before target onset on target switch trials, indicating that preparatory template activation was strongly delayed. In contrast, irrelevant color singleton probes did not trigger N2pcs on either repeat or switch trials, suggesting the absence of any target template inertia across trials. These results show that switching the identity of search targets delays preparatory target template activation and impairs subsequent attentional guidance processes. They suggest that performance costs on switch versus repeat trials are associated with differences in the time course of task preparation.

Selectively maintaining information is an essential function of visual working memory (VWM). Recent VWM studies have mainly focused on selective maintenance of objects, leaving the mechanisms of selectively maintaining an object\'s feature in VWM unknown. Based on the interactive model of perception and VWM, we hypothesized that there are distinct selective maintenance mechanisms for objects containing fine-grained features versus objects containing highly discriminable features. To test this hypothesis, we first required participants to memorize a dual-feature object (colored simple shapes vs. colored polygons), and informed them about the target feature via a retro-cue. Then a visual search task was added to examine the fate of the irrelevant feature. The selective maintenance of an object\'s feature predicted that the irrelevant feature should be removed from the active state of VWM and should not capture attention when presented as a distractor in the visual search task. We found that irrelevant simple shapes impaired performance in the visual search task (Experiment 1). However, irrelevant polygons did not affect visual search performance (Experiment 2), and this could not be explained by decay of polygons (Experiment 3) or by polygons not capturing attention (Experiment 4). These findings suggest that VWM adopts dissociable mechanisms to selectively maintain an object\'s feature, depending on the feature\'s perceptual characteristics.

Own child\'s face is one of the most socially salient stimuli for parents, and a faster search for it than for other children\'s faces may help provide warmer and more sensitive care. However, it has not been experimentally examined whether parents find their child\'s face faster. In addition, although own child\'s face is specially processed, the search time for own child\'s face may be similar to that for other socially salient stimuli, such as own or spouse\'s faces. This study tested these possibilities using a visual search paradigm. Participants (parents) searched for their child\'s, own, spouse\'s, other child\'s, same-sex adult\'s, or opposite-sex adult\'s faces as search targets. Our findings indicate that both mothers and fathers identified their child\'s face more quickly than other children\'s faces. Similarly, parents found their own and spouse\'s faces more quickly than other adults\' faces. Moreover, the search time for family members\' faces increased with the number of faces on the search display, suggesting an attentional serial search. These results suggest that robust face representations learned within families and close relationships can support reduced search times for family members\' faces.

Body image disturbance is a both a risk factor for, and a symptom of, many eating disorders and refers to the misperception of and dissatisfaction with one\'s own body. Women with high body dissatisfaction have been shown to direct more attention to low body mass index (BMI) bodies, which results in the overestimation of body size via body size adaptation. Therefore, attention may have a causal role in body image disturbance. We conducted a novel training visual search task with 142 young adult women who we trained to attend to either high or low BMI bodies. We assessed the effects of this training on attention to bodies of different sizes, body size adaptation, and body dissatisfaction. Women trained to attend to low BMI bodies decreased their perceptions of a \'normal\' body size via adaptation from pre- to post-training (p < 0.001); however, women trained to attend to high BMI bodies showed no change in their perception of a \'normal\' body size. We found no lasting effects of the training on attention to body size or body dissatisfaction; however, our visual search task showed poor internal consistency as a measure of attention. These findings indicate that attention to low BMI bodies may exacerbate body image disturbance in women. However, more reliable measures of attentional are required to confirm this finding.

Our ability to learn the regularities embedded in our environment is a fundamental aspect of our cognitive system. Does such statistical learning depend on attention? Research on this topic is scarce and has yielded mixed findings. In this preregistered study, we examined the role of spatial attention in statistical learning, and specifically in learned distractor-location suppression. This phenomenon refers to the finding that during visual search, participants are better at ignoring a salient distractor at a high-probability location than at low-probability locations - a bias persisting long after the probability imbalance has ceased. Participants searched for a shape-singleton target and a color-singleton distractor was sometimes present. During the learning phase, the color-singleton distractor was more likely to appear in the high-probability location than in the low-probability locations. Crucially, we manipulated spatial attention by having the experimental group focus their attention on the target\'s location in advance of the search display, using a 100%-informative spatial precue, while the control group was presented with a neutral, uninformative cue. During the subsequent test phase, the color-singleton distractor was equally likely to appear at any location and there were no cues. As expected, the results for the neutral-cue group replicated previous findings. Crucially, for the informative-cue group, interference from the distractor was minimal when attention was diverted from it (during learning) and no statistical learning was observed during test. Intertrial priming accounted for the small statistical-learning effect found during learning. These findings show that statistical learning in visual search requires attention.

People differ in how well they search. What are the factors that might contribute to this variability? We tested the contribution of two cognitive abilities: visual working memory (VWM) capacity and object recognition ability. Participants completed three tasks: a difficult inefficient visual search task, where they searched for a target letter T among skewed L distractors; a VWM task, where they memorized a color array and then identified whether a probed color belonged to the previous array; and the Novel Object Memory Test (NOMT), where they learnt complex novel objects and then identified them amongst objects that closely resembled them. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that there are two latent factors that explain the shared variance among these three tasks: a factor indicative of the level of caution participants exercised during the challenging visual search task, and a factor representing their visual cognitive abilities. People who score high on the search cautiousness tend to perform a more accurate but slower search. People who score high on the visual cognitive ability factor tend to have a higher VWM capacity, a better object recognition ability, and a faster search speed. The results reflect two points: (1) Visual search tasks share components with visual working memory and object recognition tasks. (2) Search performance is influenced not only by the search display\'s properties but also by individual predispositions such as caution and general visual abilities. This study introduces new factors for consideration when interpreting variations in visual search behaviors.