This study tested the hypothesis that the similarity of the cue and target in a visual search task is related to performance. Specifically, it was hypothesized that as the similarity between the cue and the target along the dimensions of stimulus contrast, spatial resolution and size increases, the amount of time that it takes to find a target among distractors decreases. Three experiments were performed to investigate the question. Experiments 1 and 2 employed a methodology that employed homogeneous search arrays where the contrast, spatial resolution and size of the elements were constant (high contrast, high spatial resolution and large size) and resulted in two small, statistically significant size effects. Experiment 3 was designed with heterogeneous search arrays for the task. This redesign produced larger performance differences that supported the similarity hypothesis. Differences in size produced the largest performance shifts, followed by differences in spatial resolution and differences in contrast producing smaller effects.

The field of cognitive modeling has progressed beyond modeling cognition in the context of simple laboratory tasks and begun to attack the problem of modeling it in more complex, realistic environments, such as those studied by researchers in the field of human factors. The problems that the cognitive modeling community is tackling focus on modeling certain problems of communication and control that arise when integrating with the external environment factors such as implicit and explicit knowledge, emotion, cognition, and the cognitive system. These problems must be solved in order to produce integrated cognitive models of moderately complex tasks. Architectures of cognition in these tasks focus on the control of a central system, which includes control of the central processor itself, initiation of functional processes, such as visual search and memory retrieval, and harvesting the results of these functional processes. Because the control of the central system is conceptually different from the internal control required by individual functional processes, a complete architecture of cognition must incorporate two types of theories of control: Type 1 theories of the structure, functionality, and operation of the controller, and type 2 theories of the internal control of functional processes, including how and what they communicate to the controller. This book presents the current state of the art for both types of theories, as well as contrasts among current approaches to human-performance models. It will be an important resource for professional and student researchers in cognitive science, cognitive-engineering, and human-factors.Contributors: Kevin A. Gluck, Jerry T. Ball, Michael A. Krusmark, Richard W. Pew, Chris R. Sims, Vladislav D. Veksler, John R. Anderson, Ron Sun, Nicholas L. Cassimatis, Randy J. Brou, Andrew D. Egerton, Stephanie M. Doane, Christopher W. Myers, Hansjorg Neth, Jeremy M Wolfe, Marc Pomplun, Ronald A. Rensink, Hansjorg Neth, Chris R. Sims, Peter M. Todd, Lael J. Schooler, Wai-Tat Fu, Michael C. Mozer, Sachiko Kinoshita, Michael Shettel, Alex Kirlik, Vladislav D. Veksler, Michael J. Schoelles, Jerome R. Busemeyer, Eric Dimperio, Ryan K. Jessup, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Glenn Gunzelmann, Kevin A. Gluck, Scott Price, Hans P. A. Van Dongen, David F. Dinges, Frank E. Ritter, Andrew L. Reifers, Laura Cousino Klein, Michael J. Schoelles, Eva Hudlicka, Hansjorg Neth, Christopher W. Myers, Dana Ballard, Nathan Sprague, Laurence T. Maloney, Julia Trommershauser, Michael S. Landy, A. Hornof, Michael J. Schoelles, David Kieras, Dario D. Salvucci, Niels Taatgen, Erik M. Altmann, Richard A. Carlson, Andrew Howes, Richard L. Lewis, Alonso Vera, Richard P. Cooper, and Michael D. Byrne

This encyclopedia brings the art of arctophily (teddy bear collecting) up to date. This edition adds 24 important antique and new bears to the more than 500 rare, familiar, classic and modern bears. Photos.

Visual search is a critical skill that is impacted by a target's physical traits and a viewer's prior knowledge of what those traits are. An open question in visual search concerns the nature of the target template, an internal cognitive representation of the target one is searching for and that is used to guide search. Target templates are created from knowledge about the target; in research settings this information is typically conferred to a searcher in the form of a cue. A more detailed target template is known to lead to the best search, but how a cue that lacks specific or accurate details forms a target template is not well explored. The current study examines how categorical cues impact target template creation, specifically aiming to resolve the controversy of whether and under what conditions a word cue can perform as well as an image cue. Participants searched for real world objects in an array, cued by various pictures or words. In Experiment 1, participants experienced written and auditory label cues in addition to exact target previews and visually similar image (type picture) cues; type picture cues performed significantly better than either of the word cues, which did not differ from each other. In Experiment 2, a specific label condition was added and visually heterogenous type picture cues were used. The specific auditory label resulted in reduced search times compared to basic labels and the new type cues. These results highlight the importance of specificity in target template creation and demonstrate constraints under which some verbal cues can be more effective than image cues.

The Influence of Attention, Learning, and Motivation on Visual Search will bring together distinguished authors who are conducting cutting edge research on the many factors that influence search behavior. These factors will include low-level feature detection; statistical learning; scene perception; neural mechanisms of attention; and applied research in real world settings.

The notion that certain mental or physical events can capture attention has been one of the most enduring topics in the study of attention owing to the importance of understanding how goal-directed and stimulus-driven processes interact in perception and cognition. Despite the clear theoretical and applied importance of attentional capture, a broad survey of this field suggests that the term "capture" means different things to different people. In some cases, it refers to covert shifts of spatial attention, in others involuntary saccades, and in still others general disruption of processing by irrelevant stimuli. The properties that elicit "capture" can also range from abruptly onset or moving lights, to discontinuities in textures, to unexpected tones, to emotionally valenced words or pictures, to directional signs and symbols. Attentional capture has been explored in both the spatial and temporal domains as well as the visual and auditory modalities. There are also a number of different theoretical perspectives on the mechanisms underlying "capture" (both functional and neurophysiological) and the level of cognitive control over capture. This special issue provides a sampling of the diversity of approaches, domains, and theoretical perspectives that currently exist in the study of attentional capture. Together, these contributions should help evaluate the degree to which attentional capture represents a unitary construct that reflects fundamental theoretical principles and mechanisms of the mind.