Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, California 92093-0109, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2021 May;83(4):1435-1454. doi: 10.3758/s13414-020-02213-w. Epub 2021 Jan 6.
When you search repeatedly for a set of items among very similar distractors, does that make you more efficient in locating the targets? To address this, we had observers search for two categories of targets among the same set of distractors across trials. Visual and conceptual similarity of the stimuli were validated with a multidimensional scaling analysis, and separately using a deep neural network model. After a few blocks of visual search trials, the distractor set was replaced. In three experiments, we manipulated the level of discriminability between the targets and distractors before and after the distractors were replaced. Our results suggest that in the presence of repeated distractors, observers generally become more efficient. However, the difficulty of the search task does impact how efficient people are when the distractor set is replaced. Specifically, when the training is easy, people are more impaired in a difficult transfer test. We attribute this effect to the precision of the target template generated during training. In particular, a coarse target template is created when the target and distractors are easy to discriminate. These coarse target templates do not transfer well in a context with new distractors. This suggests that learning with more distinct targets and distractors can result in lower performance when context changes, but observers recover from this effect quickly (within a block of search trials).
当你在非常相似的干扰项中反复搜索一组项目时，这是否会让你更有效地找到目标？为了解决这个问题，我们让观察者在不同的试验中在同一组干扰项中搜索两类目标。通过多维尺度分析和深度神经网络模型分别验证了刺激的视觉和概念相似性。在几轮视觉搜索试验后，更换干扰项集。在三个实验中，我们在更换干扰项之前和之后操纵目标和干扰项之间的可辨别性水平。我们的结果表明，在存在重复干扰项的情况下，观察者通常会变得更有效率。然而，搜索任务的难度确实会影响当干扰项集被替换时人们的效率。具体来说，当训练容易时，人们在困难的转移测试中受到的影响更大。我们将这种效果归因于训练过程中生成的目标模板的精度。特别是，当目标和干扰项容易区分时，会创建一个粗略的目标模板。这些粗略的目标模板在有新干扰项的情况下不能很好地转移。这表明，使用更明显的目标和干扰项进行学习可能会导致上下文变化时的表现下降，但观察者可以迅速从中恢复（在一轮搜索试验内）。
