Biggs Adam T, Adamo Stephen H, Dowd Emma Wu, Mitroff Stephen R
Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, B203 LSRC, Box 90999, Durham, NC, 27708, USA,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2015 Apr;77(3):844-55. doi: 10.3758/s13414-014-0822-0.
Visual search is a common practice conducted countless times every day, and one important aspect of visual search is that multiple targets can appear in a single search array. For example, an X-ray image of airport luggage could contain both a water bottle and a gun. Searchers are more likely to miss additional targets after locating a first target in multiple-target searches, which presents a potential problem: If airport security officers were to find a water bottle, would they then be more likely to miss a gun? One hypothetical cause of multiple-target search errors is that searchers become biased to detect additional targets that are similar to a found target, and therefore become less likely to find additional targets that are dissimilar to the first target. This particular hypothesis has received theoretical, but little empirical, support. In the present study, we tested the bounds of this idea by utilizing "big data" obtained from the mobile application Airport Scanner. Multiple-target search errors were substantially reduced when the two targets were identical, suggesting that the first-found target did indeed create biases during subsequent search. Further analyses delineated the nature of the biases, revealing both a perceptual set bias (i.e., a bias to find additional targets with features similar to those of the first-found target) and a conceptual set bias (i.e., a bias to find additional targets with a conceptual relationship to the first-found target). These biases are discussed in terms of the implications for visual-search theories and applications for professional visual searchers.
视觉搜索是一种每天都会进行无数次的常见行为，而视觉搜索的一个重要方面是，多个目标可能会出现在单个搜索阵列中。例如，机场行李的X光图像可能既包含一个水瓶又包含一把枪。在多目标搜索中，搜索者在找到第一个目标后更有可能错过其他目标，这就带来了一个潜在问题：如果机场安检人员找到了一个水瓶，那么他们是否更有可能错过一把枪？多目标搜索错误的一个假设原因是，搜索者会偏向于检测与已找到目标相似的其他目标，因此找到与第一个目标不同的其他目标的可能性就会降低。这一特定假设得到了理论支持，但实证支持较少。在本研究中，我们通过利用从移动应用程序“机场扫描仪”获得的“大数据”来测试这一观点的局限性。当两个目标相同时，多目标搜索错误大幅减少，这表明首先找到的目标在后续搜索中确实产生了偏差。进一步的分析明确了偏差的性质，揭示了一种知觉定势偏差（即偏向于找到具有与首先找到的目标相似特征的其他目标）和一种概念定势偏差（即偏向于找到与首先找到的目标具有概念关系的其他目标）。将根据这些偏差对视觉搜索理论的影响以及对专业视觉搜索者的应用来进行讨论。
