Chang in Cognitive Bag Lunch Weds. 3/29 at noon

Junha Chang (UMass) will present in the Cognitive Bag Lunch Wednesday, March 29 at 12pm in Tobin 521B. All are welcome! Title and abstract follow.

Title: Search guidance can be adjusted by experience with search discriminability

Abstract: Several recent studies show that previous experience can influence search strategy in a way that improves search performance. The purpose of the present study is to investigate how the experience of difficult color discriminability affects search strategies. Two participants groups either experienced difficult color discriminability in a half of the trials (i.e., hard-discrimination group) or experienced easy search in all trials (i.e., easy-discrimination group) in a dual-target search task. Participants were required to respond to the presence of a target (colored T) among distractors (colored pseudo-L). Eye movements were recorded to understand which feature information is used to guide attention, and response times and error rates were measured to compare search efficiency between the two participant groups. The hard-discrimination group fixated more distractors with target-dissimilar colors than the easy-discrimination group, suggesting the hard-discrimination group used shape information to guide search more than the easy-discrimination group. However, the error rates and response times were not significantly different between groups. The results demonstrate that the experience of difficult color discriminability discourages participants from guiding attention by color, and encourages them to use shape information.