Evidence map›Paper›PMID 36711068›Full record

ArticleNature human behaviour2017

Five Factors that Guide Attention in Visual Search.

Jeremy M Wolfe, Todd S Horowitz

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Nature human behaviour, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 291 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
291citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

291 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Trial
  2. Article
  3. The role of singleton salience in second-order suppression.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026
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  15. Effort expectation and strategic cue use in visual search.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026
    Article
  16. Article
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  20. Contributions of Distinct Attention Mechanisms to Saccadic Choices in a Gamified, Dynamic Environment.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026
    Article

231 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Jeremy M WolfeBrigham and Women's Hospital / Harvard Med.
Todd S HorowitzNIH, National Cancer Inst.

Funding

Prevalence effects in visual search: Theoretical and practical implicationsR01EY017001 · NEI · BRIGHAM AND WOMEN'S HOSPITAL · PI Jeremy M Wolfe · 2007 to 2026
$8.2M
Improving Perception in Digital Breast TomographyR01CA207490 · NCI · BRIGHAM AND WOMEN'S HOSPITAL · PI WOLFE, JEREMY M · 2016 to 2025
$4.6M
NCI NIH HHS R01 CA207490NEI NIH HHS R01 EY017001
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

How do we find what we are looking for? Fundamental limits on visual processing mean that even when the desired target is in our field of view, we often need to search, because it is impossible to recognize everything at once. Searching involves directing attention to objects that might be the target. This deployment of attention is not random. It is guided to the most promising items and locations by five factors discussed here: Bottom-up salience, top-down feature guidance, scene structure and meaning, the previous history of search over time scales from msec to years, and the relative value of the targets and distractors. Modern theories of search need to specify how all five factors combine to shape search behavior. An understanding of the rules of guidance can be used to improve the accuracy and efficiency of socially-important search tasks, from security screening to medical image perception.

Identifiers

PMID36711068
PMCPMC9879335

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Registered trials

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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.