Cognitive Neuroscience of Perception and Action, Department of Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, Gutenbergstraße 18, 35032, Marburg, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2023 Aug 2;13(1):12541. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-38362-9.
Search templates guide human visual attention toward relevant targets. Templates are often seen as encoding exact target features, but recent studies suggest that templates rather contain "relational properties" (e.g., they facilitate "redder" stimuli instead of specific hues of red). Such relational guidance seems helpful in naturalistic searches where illumination or perspective renders exact feature values unreliable. So far relational guidance has only been demonstrated in rather artificial single-target search tasks with briefly flashed displays. Here, we investigate whether relational guidance also occurs when humans interact with the search environment for longer durations to collect multiple target elements. In a visual foraging task, participants searched for and collected multiple targets among distractors of different relationships to the target colour. Distractors whose colour differed from the environment in the same direction as the targets reduced foraging efficiency to the same amount as distractors whose colour matched the target colour. Distractors that differed by the same colour distance but in the opposite direction of the target colour did not reduce efficiency. These findings provide evidence that search templates encode relational target features in naturalistic search tasks and suggest that attention guidance based on relational features is a common mode in dynamic, real-world search environments.
搜索模板引导人类视觉注意到相关目标。模板通常被视为编码确切的目标特征，但最近的研究表明，模板反而包含“关系属性”（例如，它们促进“更红”的刺激，而不是特定的红色调）。这种关系引导在自然搜索中很有帮助，在自然搜索中，光照或视角使得确切的特征值不可靠。到目前为止，关系引导仅在具有短暂闪烁显示的相当人为的单一目标搜索任务中得到证明。在这里，我们研究了当人类与搜索环境交互以更长时间收集多个目标元素时，关系引导是否也会发生。在视觉觅食任务中，参与者在与目标颜色具有不同关系的干扰项中搜索和收集多个目标。与目标颜色在同一方向上与环境颜色不同的干扰项会降低觅食效率，与目标颜色匹配的干扰项相同。颜色距离相同但与目标颜色方向相反的干扰项不会降低效率。这些发现为搜索模板在自然搜索任务中编码关系目标特征提供了证据，并表明基于关系特征的注意力引导是动态、真实世界搜索环境中的一种常见模式。
