title: Do People Take Stimulus Correlations into Account in Visual Search?
abstract: In laboratory visual search experiments, distractors are often statistically independent of each other. However, stimuli in more naturalistic settings are often correlated and rarely independent. Here, we examine whether human observers take stimulus correlations into account in orientation target detection. We find that they do, although probably not optimally. In particular, it seems that low distractor correlations are overestimated. Our results might contribute to bridging the gap between artificial and natural visual search tasks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, United States of America.
authors.forename: Manisha
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bhardwaj
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of America.|Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
authors.forename: Ronald
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: van den Berg
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of America.|Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America.
authors.forename: Wei Ji
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, United States of America.|Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, United States of America.
authors.forename: Krešimir
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Josić
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011594:Psychometrics; D014796:Visual Perception