Psychology Commons^™

Leveling The Viewing Field: The Impact Of Target Prevalence On Searcher's Functional Viewing Field, Juan D. Guevara Pinto

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

It is well known that target prevalence impacts various cognitive processes. In visual search, rare search targets are more difficult to detect than common targets. The present research investigated novel questions about target prevalence, focusing on observers’ functional viewing field (FVF) during passive search tasks. The FVF is the area in a display where attention is focused and item processing is enhanced. According the FVF framework (Hulleman & Olivers, 2017), the size of the FVF is modulated by the ease of target detections, such that visual search involving difficult target detection reduces the FVF. Although this would suggest that low …