human visual search does not maximize the post-saccadic probability of identifying targets人类视觉搜索不确定目标的post-saccadic概率最大化.pdfVIP

Human Visual Search Does Not Maximize the Post- Saccadic Probability of Identifying Targets Camille Morvan1,2,3*, Laurence T. Maloney1,2 1 Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America, 2 Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America, 3 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America Abstract Researchers have conjectured that eye movements during visual search are selected to minimize the number of saccades. The optimal Bayesian eye movement strategy minimizing saccades does not simply direct the eye to whichever location is judged most likely to contain the target but makes use of the entire retina as an information gathering device during each fixation. Here we show that human observers do not minimize the expected number of saccades in planning saccades in a simple visual search task composed of three tokens. In this task, the optimal eye movement strategy varied, depending on the spacing between tokens (in the first experiment) or the size of tokens (in the second experiment), and changed abruptly once the separation or size surpassed a critical value. None of our observers changed strategy as a function of separation or size. Human performance fell far short of ideal, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Citation: Morvan C, Maloney LT (2012) Human Visual Search Does Not Maximize the Post-Saccadic Probability of Identifying Targets. PLoS Comput Biol 8(2): e1002342. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002342 Editor: Konrad P. Kording, Northwestern University, United States of America Received May 19, 2011; Accepted November 21, 2011; Published February 2, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Morvan, Maloney. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and re