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Five factors that guide attention in visual search

Nature Human Behaviour volume 1, Article number: 0058 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

How do we find what we are looking for? Even when the desired target is in the current field of view, we need to search because fundamental limits on visual processing make it 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 timescales ranging from milliseconds to years, and the relative value of the targets and distractors. Modern theories of visual search need to incorporate all five factors and specify how these factors combine to shape search behaviour. 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.

How can a texting pedestrian walk right into a pole, even though it is clearly visible1? At any given moment, our attention and eyes are focused on some aspects of the scene in front of us, while other portions of the visible world go relatively unattended. We deploy this selective visual attention because we are unable to fully process everything in the scene at the same time. We have the impression of seeing everything in front of our eyes, but over most of the visual field, we are probably seeing something like visual textures, rather than objects2,3. Identifying specific objects and apprehending their relationships to each other typically requires attention, as our unfortunate texting pedestrian can attest.

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Figure 1: A surprisingly difficult search task.
Figure 2: The basic visual search paradigm.
Figure 3
Figure 4: Scene guidance.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Surgery, Visual Attention Lab, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 64 Sidney Street, Suite 170, Cambridge, 02139-4170, Massachusetts, USA

    Jeremy M. Wolfe

  2. Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, Basic Biobehavioral and Psychological Sciences Branch, Behavioral Research Program, National Cancer Institute, 9609 Medical Center Drive, 3E-116, Rockville, 20850, Maryland, USA

    Todd S. Horowitz

Authors
  1. Jeremy M. Wolfe
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  2. Todd S. Horowitz
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Correspondence to Jeremy M. Wolfe.

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Competing interests

J.M.W occasionally serves as an expert witness or consultant (paid or unpaid) on the applications of visual search to topics from legal disputes (for example, how could that truck have hit that clearly visible motorcycle?) to consumer behaviour (for example, how could we redesign this shelf to attract more attention to our product?).

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Wolfe, J., Horowitz, T. Five factors that guide attention in visual search. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0058 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0058

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