ArticleVisual cognition2019
Learned feature variance is encoded in the target template and drives visual search.
Article in Visual cognition, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Flexible weighting of target features based on distractor context.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2020Trial
- Repeated exposure to task-relevant and task-irrelevant information - and their interaction - affect visual search performance.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- The Inferior Frontal Junction Jointly Encodes Target Identity and Feature Uncertainty.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Attention to object categories: Selection history determines the breadth of attentional tuning during real-world object search.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- Task-adaptive changes to the target template in response to distractor context: Separability versus similarity.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- Prefrontal Cortex Codes Representations of Target Identity and Feature Uncertainty.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Expected distractor context biases the attentional template for target shapes.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2023Article
- Learned feature regularities enable suppression of spatially overlapping stimuli.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Assessing satisfaction of search in virtual mammograms for experienced and novice searchers.Journal of medical imaging (Bellingham, Wash.) · 2023Article
- Attentional priority is determined by predicted feature distributions.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2022Article
- Temporal integration of feature probability distributions.Psychological research · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Real world visual search targets are frequently imperfect perceptual matches to our internal target templates. For example, the same friend on different occasions is likely to wear different clothes, hairstyles, and accessories, but some of these may be more likely to vary than others. The ability to deal with template-to-target variability is important to visual search in natural environments, but we know relatively little about how feature variability is handled by the attentional system. In these studies, we test the hypothesis that top-down attentional biases are sensitive to the variance of target feature dimensions over time and prioritize information from less-variable dimensions. On each trial, subjects were shown a target cue composed of colored dots moving in a specific direction followed by a working memory probe (30%) or visual search display (70%). Critically, the target features in the visual search display differed from the cue, with one feature drawn from a distribution narrowly centered over the cued feature (low-variance dimension), and the other sampled from a broader distribution (high-variance dimension). The results demonstrate that subjects used knowledge of the likely cue-to-target variance to set template precision and bias attentional selection. Moreover, an individual's working memory precision for each feature predicted search performance. Our results suggest that observers are sensitive to the variance of feature dimensions within a target and use this information to weight mechanisms of attentional selection.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.