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Moving towards solutions to some enduring controversies in visual search

Trends in Cognitive SciencesPublished 1 February 2003
Jeremy M. Wolfe
Citations276
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score4.51
SNIP5.51

TL;DR

Recent work has shed new light on a two-stage solution to the problem of visual search: a preattentive stage that could process a limited number of basic features in parallel and an attentive stage that can perform more complex acts of recognition, one object at a time.

Abstract

How do we find a target item in a visual world filled with distractors? A quarter of a century ago, in her influential 'Feature Integration Theory (FIT)', Treisman proposed a two-stage solution to the problem of visual search: a preattentive stage that could process a limited number of basic features in parallel and an attentive stage that could perform more complex acts of recognition, one object at a time. The theory posed a series of problems. What is the nature of that preattentive stage? How do serial and parallel processes interact? How does a search unfold over time? Recent work has shed new light on these issues.

Keywords

Computer ScienceNeuroscience