Department of Psychology, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2013;8(1):e53420. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0053420. Epub 2013 Jan 8.
Considerable research has been carried out on visual search, with single or multiple targets. However, most studies have used artificial stimuli with low ecological validity. In addition, little is known about the effects of target complexity and expertise in visual search. Here, we investigate visual search in three conditions of complexity (detecting a king, detecting a check, and detecting a checkmate) with chess players of two levels of expertise (novices and club players). Results show that the influence of target complexity depends on level of structure of the visual display. Different functional relationships were found between artificial (random chess positions) and ecologically valid (game positions) stimuli: With artificial, but not with ecologically valid stimuli, a "pop out" effect was present when a target was visually more complex than distractors but could be captured by a memory chunk. This suggests that caution should be exercised when generalising from experiments using artificial stimuli with low ecological validity to real-life stimuli.
已经有相当多的研究针对单一或多个目标的视觉搜索进行了研究。然而，大多数研究都使用了低生态效度的人工刺激物。此外，对于目标复杂性和视觉搜索专业知识的影响知之甚少。在这里，我们调查了三种复杂程度（检测国王、检测检查、检测将死）的视觉搜索，参与者是两个级别的棋手（新手和俱乐部棋手）。结果表明，目标复杂性的影响取决于视觉显示的结构水平。在人工（随机国际象棋位置）和生态有效（游戏位置）刺激物之间发现了不同的功能关系：使用人工刺激物，但不是生态有效刺激物，当目标在视觉上比干扰物更复杂但可以通过记忆块捕获时，会出现“突出”效应。这表明，当从使用低生态效度的人工刺激物进行的实验推广到真实生活刺激物时，应谨慎行事。
