Psychology Department, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70808, USA.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2010 Sep;16(3):238-50. doi: 10.1037/a0019633.
Set size and crowding affect search efficiency by limiting attention for recognition and attention against competition; however, these factors can be difficult to quantify in complex search tasks. The current experiments use a quantitative measure of the amount and variability of visual information (i.e., clutter) in highly complex stimuli (i.e., digital aeronautical charts) to examine limits of attention in visual search. Undergraduates at a large southern university searched for a target among 4, 8, or 16 distractors in charts with high, medium, or low global clutter. The target was in a high or low local-clutter region of the chart. In Experiment 1, reaction time increased as global clutter increased, particularly when the target was in a high local-clutter region. However, there was no effect of distractor set size, supporting the notion that global clutter is a better measure of attention against competition in complex visual search tasks. As a control, Experiment 2 demonstrated that increasing the number of distractors leads to a typical set size effect when there is no additional clutter (i.e., no chart). In Experiment 3, the effects of global and local clutter were minimized when the target was highly salient. When the target was nonsalient, more fixations were observed in high global clutter charts, indicating that the number of elements competing with the target for attention was also high. The results suggest design techniques that could improve pilots' search performance in aeronautical charts.
集大小和拥挤通过限制识别和对抗竞争的注意力来影响搜索效率；然而，在复杂的搜索任务中，这些因素很难量化。当前的实验使用一种量化的方法来测量高度复杂刺激物（即数字航空图表）中视觉信息的数量和可变性（即杂乱），以检查视觉搜索中的注意力限制。一所大型南方大学的本科生在图表中搜索 4、8 或 16 个干扰项中的目标，这些图表的全局杂乱程度高、中或低。目标位于图表的高或低局部杂乱区域。在实验 1 中，随着全局杂乱度的增加，反应时间增加，尤其是当目标位于高局部杂乱区域时。然而，干扰项集大小没有影响，这支持了全局杂乱度是衡量复杂视觉搜索任务中对抗竞争的注意力的更好指标的观点。作为对照，实验 2 表明，当没有额外的杂乱（即没有图表）时，增加干扰项的数量会导致典型的集大小效应。在实验 3 中，当目标高度明显时，全局和局部杂乱的影响最小化。当目标不明显时，在高全局杂乱度图表中观察到更多的注视，这表明与目标竞争注意力的元素数量也很高。结果表明，设计技术可以提高飞行员在航空图表中的搜索性能。
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