Talk:Visual search

Dear Reviewer 1

Thanks

I did some version of most of what you suggested. Someone from my lab (who understands these things) will try to reformat the table and will take ut the sray initials.

regards

jw

I think this is an excellent article. My comments are constructive and mostly minor. I am not comfortable conveying my suggestions via editing. Therefore I have chosen the "review" option.

I prefer to leave it to the author to decide how to respond to my suggestions. In a regular journal article the editor might have some considerable sway in evaluating the reviewers suggestions and guiding the revision process. That seems unlikely in this forum. Have fun, Jeremy.

1) When accuracy is mentioned as an alternative to RT as a way to study search (p. 3) I recommend a pointer to the work and thinking of John Palmer. For example: "In other experimental regimes, more information is obtained from the error rates (Palmer et al., 2000) than from the RTs." Ref: Palmer, J., Verghese, P., & Pavel, M. (2000). The psychophysics of visual search. Vision Research, 40, 1227-1268.

2) In this same section, there is a very nice paper by Dukewich & Klein that could be cited to illustrate this next point: " For example, if stimuli are briefly presented, it is error rate that will increase with set size, rather than RT (e.g., Dukewich & Klein, 2005) Ref: Dukewich, K. & Klein, R. M. (2005) Implications of search accuracy for serial self-terminating models of search. Visual Cognition., 12, 1386-1403.

3) I think it would be wise if the section "Classification of Guiding Attributes" could be rewritten as a table or simply converted into prose. Either option would work better than the present format.

On p. 8 there is reference to Klein's proposal that IOR might help make search more efficient. I have several comments and suggestions about this section.

4) "Many models of search have argued that each item is only examined once, a process known as sampling without replacement. This would require a high-capacity memory for examined items." While it is true that some scholars have suggested that items might only be inspected once, most scholars construe IOR as an imperfect, implicit memory system that discourages, but does not eliminate the possibility of, reinspections. I recommend that this sentence be rewritten to reflect this more modal view. 5) Then, the Itti & Koch paper that is mentioned later in the computational modelling section ought to be mentioned at the end of the next sentence: "Many models make use of the phenomenon of "inhibition of return" (IOR) for this purpose (e.g., Itti & Koch, 2001)" 6) At the end of the next sentence I believe it would be warranted to cite Posner & Cohen, 1984, who discovered IOR, or a review of IOR like that by Klein (2000), Lupianez et al, or this encyclopedia (though this is not yet writte). "IOR refers to the finding that it is harder to direct attention to a recently attended location or object (Posner & Cohen, 1984; for a review see Klein, 2000)". Possible refs: Lupiañez, J., Klein, R. M. & Bartolomeo, P. (2006) Inhibition of return: Twenty years after. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 23, 1003-114. Klein, R. M. (2000) Inhibition of return. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(4), 138-147. Posner, M.I., & Cohen, Y.A. (1984). Components of Visual Orienting. In: H. Bouma & D.G. Bouwhuis (Eds), Attention and Performance X. (pp.531-554), Hillsdale NJ. Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. 7) "In principle, IOR could prevent deployment of attention to rejected distractors (R. Klein, 1988)." I recommend dropping the "R. ". It is misleading to refer to R. Klein as the author of the Nature paper since the purpose of using an initial is to distinguish this Klein from RM Klein the author of Klein & Farrell (1989) but they are one and the same. 8) Generally this article is evenhanded, but the proposal that IOR might function as a search facilitator is, in my mind, rejected too confidently: "In practice, however, search slopes are, at most, modestly affected when IOR is disrupted (Horowitz & Wolfe, 1998)." Horowitz & Wolfe's inference that search is memoryless (because RT slopes were not different in standard static search and in a clever dynamic condition where memory could not be helpful) has been challenged by many authors and from several directions (see Shore & Klein, for a review).

9) In the section on eye movements (p. 10) I recommend that incorporation of reference to work showing that when eye movements are required to go back to a previously fixated location this is hard to do (participants are unlikely to do it or slow to do it). The papers I have in mind are the Klein & MacInnes's "Where's Waldo" study and the "follow the dots" studies by McCarley et al and Boot et al, from Art Kramer's lab. Boot, W. R., McCarley, J. S., Kramer, A. F., & Peterson, M. S. (2004). Automatic and intentional memory processes in visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 854–861. Klein, R. M. & MacInnes, W. J. (1999) Inhibition of return is a foraging facilitator in visual search. Psychological Science, 10(4), 346-352. McCarley, J. S., Wang, R. X. F., Kramer, A. F., Irwin, D. E., and Peterson, M. S. (2003). How much memory does oculomotor search have? Psychol. Sci. 14, 422–426.