Rare, but obviously there Effects of target frequency and salience on visual search accuracy》.pdf

Acta Psychologica 152 (2014) 158–165 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Acta Psychologica journal homepage: / locate/actpsy Rare, but obviously there: Effects of target frequency and salience on ☆ visual search accuracy Adam T. Biggs ⁎, Stephen H. Adamo, Stephen R. Mitroff Department of Psychology Neuroscience, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, United States a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Accuracy can be extremely important for many visual search tasks. However, numerous factors work to under- Received 24 February 2014 mine successful search. Several negative influences on search have been well studied, yet one potentially influ- Received in revised form 29 July 2014 ential factor has gone almost entirely unexplored—namely, how is search performance affected by the Accepted 8 August 2014 likelihood that a specific target might appear? A recent study demonstrated that when specific targets appear in- Available online 16 September 2014 frequently (i.e., once in every thousand trials) they were, on average, not often found. Even so, some infrequently PsycINFO classifi cation: appearing targets were actually found quite often, suggesting that the targets frequency is not the only factor at 2300 play. Here, we investigated whether salience (i.e., the extent to which an item stands out during search) could 2323