Abstract

We search the visual world using different strategies, some of them relying on bottom-up salience, others on top-down expectations. However, little is known about how we arbitrate between them. Here, we report a study investigating whether people are sensitive to environmental regularities that incentivize different strategies with differential effort requirements. To test this, we used a visual search task in which people need to search a target in a field of items, each of which is printed in one of two colors. This task allows us to parametrically manipulate bottom-up salience by varying the number of items with the less numerous (“minority”) color, and top-down expectations by adjusting the probability that the target is contained in the set with the minority color. We found that even though people’s attention tended to be captured by the group of items with the minority color, they used environmental regularities to adapt their strategy to improve search efficiency. Interestingly, we found that people could only be biased away from their natural inclination to be captured by salient information if the task promotes serial visual search, suggesting an asymmetry in how top-down expectations can modulate bottom-up tendencies.

Committee Chair

Wouter Kool

Committee Members

Richard Abrams, Julie Bugg

Degree

Master of Arts (AM/MA)

Author's Department

Psychology

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

Spring 5-2025

Language

English (en)

Author's ORCID

0000-0003-2337-4948

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