Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Why Is It Difficult To Search For Two Colors At Once? How Eye Movements Can Reveal The Nature Of Representations During Multi-Target Visual Search, Michael John Stroud

Open Access Dissertations

Visual search consists of locating a known target amongst a field of distractors. Often times, observers must search for more than one object at once. Eye movements were monitored in a series of visual search experiments examining search efficiency and how color is represented in order to guide search for multiple targets. The results demonstrated that observers were very color selective when searching for a single color. However, when searching for two colors at once, the degree of similarity between the two target colors had varying effects on fixation patterns. Search for two very similar colors was almost as efficient …