Reichenthal Adam, Ben-Tov Mor, Ben-Shahar Ohad, Segev Ronen
Life Sciences Department, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
J Vis. 2019 Jan 2;19(1):1. doi: 10.1167/19.1.1.
Visual search is the ability to detect a target of interest against a background of distracting objects. For many animals, performing this task fast and accurately is crucial for survival. Typically, visual-search performance is measured by the time it takes the observer to detect a target against a backdrop of distractors. The efficiency of a visual search depends fundamentally on the features of the target, the distractors, and the interaction between them. Substantial efforts have been devoted to investigating the influence of different visual features on visual-search performance in humans. In particular, it has been demonstrated that color, size, orientation, and motion are efficient visual features to guide attention in humans. However, little is known about which features are efficient and which are not in other vertebrates. Given earlier observations that moving targets elicit pop-out and parallel search in the archerfish during visual-search tasks, here we investigate and confirm that all four of these visual features also facilitate efficient search in the archerfish in a manner comparable to humans. In conjunction with results reported for other species, these finding suggest universality in the way visual search is carried out by animals despite very different brain anatomies and living environments.
视觉搜索是指在有干扰物体的背景中检测出感兴趣目标的能力。对于许多动物来说，快速准确地执行这项任务对生存至关重要。通常，视觉搜索性能是通过观察者在干扰物背景下检测到目标所需的时间来衡量的。视觉搜索的效率从根本上取决于目标、干扰物的特征以及它们之间的相互作用。人们已经投入了大量精力来研究不同视觉特征对人类视觉搜索性能的影响。特别是，已经证明颜色、大小、方向和运动是引导人类注意力的有效视觉特征。然而，对于其他脊椎动物来说，哪些特征是有效的，哪些是无效的，我们却知之甚少。鉴于早期的观察结果表明，在视觉搜索任务中，移动目标会在射水鱼中引发突出和平行搜索，在此我们进行了研究并证实，这四种视觉特征在射水鱼中也能以与人类相当的方式促进高效搜索。结合其他物种报告的结果，这些发现表明，尽管动物的大脑解剖结构和生活环境非常不同，但它们进行视觉搜索的方式具有普遍性。
