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Visual Search in Real-World and Applied Contexts

Visual search tasks are an everyday part of the human experience - ranging from hunting for a specific recipe ingredient in the pantry to monitoring for road hazards and informational signs while driving. Due to its ubiquity in everyday life, visual search has been extensively studied in the laboratory for decades even if laboratory tasks are unable to capture the full complexity of real-world visual search tasks. In recent years, there has been a growing body of research seeking to narrow the gaps in our understanding of visual search behavior between the laboratory and the real world. The purpose of this special issue in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CRPI) is to bring together this important research. 

Edited By:

  • Editor-in-Chief Jeremy M. Wolfe
  • Guest Editor Trafton Drew
  • Assistant Guest Editor Lauren H. Williams

This collection of articles has not been sponsored and articles have undergone the journal’s standard peer-review process. The Guest Editors declare no competing interests.

  1. Individuals with homonymous visual field loss (HVFL) fail to perceive visual information that falls within the blind portions of their visual field. This places additional burden on memory to represent informa...

    Authors: Garrett Swan, Jing Xu, Vilte Baliutaviciute and Alex Bowers
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2022 7:44
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  2. Two aspects of real-world visual search are typically studied in parallel: category knowledge (e.g., searching for food) and visual patterns (e.g., predicting an upcoming street sign from prior street signs). ...

    Authors: Austin Moon, Jiaying Zhao, Megan A. K. Peters and Rachel Wu
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2022 7:21
    Content type: Brief report Published on:

  3. In radiological screening, clinicians scan myriads of radiographs with the intent of recognizing and differentiating lesions. Even though they are trained experts, radiologists’ human search engines are not pe...

    Authors: Mauro Manassi, Cristina Ghirardo, Teresa Canas-Bajo, Zhihang Ren, William Prinzmetal and David Whitney
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:65
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  4. Finding an unfamiliar person in a crowd of others is an integral task for police officers, CCTV-operators, and security staff who may be looking for a suspect or missing person; however, research suggests that...

    Authors: Viktoria R. Mileva, Peter J. B. Hancock and Stephen R. H. Langton
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:63
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  5. For over 50 years, the satisfaction of search effect has been studied within the field of radiology. Defined as a decrease in detection rates for a subsequent target when an initial target is found within the ...

    Authors: Stephen H. Adamo, Brian J. Gereke, Sarah Shomstein and Joseph Schmidt
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:59
    Content type: Review article Published on:

  6. Prior research has shown that interruptions lead to a variety of performance costs. However, these costs are heterogenous and poorly understood. Under some circumstances, interruptions lead to large decreases ...

    Authors: David Alonso, Mark Lavelle and Trafton Drew
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:58
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  7. In the present study, we investigated whether police officers’ performance in searching for unfamiliar faces in a video-based real-world task is predicted by laboratory-based face processing tests that are typ...

    Authors: Markus M. Thielgen, Stefan Schade and Carolin Bosé
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:54
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  8. Visual search in dynamic environments, for example lifeguarding or CCTV monitoring, has several fundamentally different properties to standard visual search tasks. The visual environment is constantly moving, ...

    Authors: Emily M. Crowe, Christina J. Howard, Iain D. Gilchrist and Christopher Kent
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:47
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  9. Eye tracking is a useful tool for studying human cognition, both in the laboratory and in real-world applications. However, there are cases in which eye tracking is not possible, such as in high-security envir...

    Authors: Laura E. Matzen, Mallory C. Stites and Zoe. N. Gastelum
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:45
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  10. Over-the-counter (OTC) drugs have many benefits but also carry risks, such as adverse drug reactions, which are more prevalent in older adults. Because these products do not require the oversight of a physicia...

    Authors: Alyssa L. Harben, Deborah A. Kashy, Shiva Esfahanian, Lanqing Liu, Laura Bix and Mark W. Becker
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:40
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  11. Attention is known to play an important role in shaping the behaviour of both human and animal foragers. Here, in three experiments, we built on previous interactive tasks to create an online foraging game for...

    Authors: Ian M. Thornton, Jérôme Tagu, Sunčica Zdravković and Árni Kristjánsson
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:35
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  12. When searching for a known target, mental representations of target features, or templates, guide attention towards matching objects and facilitate recognition. When only distractor features are known, distrac...

    Authors: Alex Muhl-Richardson, Maximilian G. Parker, Sergio A. Recio, Maria Tortosa-Molina, Jennifer L. Daffron and Greg J. Davis
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:33
    Content type: Original article Published on:

    The Correction to this article has been published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:60

  13. A major problem in human cognition is to understand how newly acquired information and long-standing beliefs about the environment combine to make decisions and plan behaviors. Over-dependence on long-standing...

    Authors: Gwendolyn L. Rehrig, Michelle Cheng, Brian C. McMahan and Rahul Shome
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:32
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  14. Camouflage-breaking is a special case of visual search where an object of interest, or target, can be hard to distinguish from the background even when in plain view. We have previously shown that naive, non-p...

    Authors: Fallon Branch, Allison JoAnna Lewis, Isabella Noel Santana and Jay Hegdé
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:27
    Content type: Brief report Published on:

  15. Professional screeners frequently verify photograph IDs in such industries as professional security, bar tending, and sales of age-restricted materials. Moreover, security screening is a vital tool for law enf...

    Authors: Dawn R. Weatherford, Devin Roberson and William Blake Erickson
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:25
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  16. When a visual search target frequently appears in one target-rich region of space, participants learn to search there first, resulting in faster reaction time when the target appears there than when it appears...

    Authors: Caitlin A. Sisk, Victoria Interrante and Yuhong V. Jiang
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:21
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  17. Professions such as radiology and aviation security screening that rely on visual search—the act of looking for targets among distractors—often cannot provide operators immediate feedback, which can create sit...

    Authors: Patrick H. Cox, Dwight J. Kravitz and Stephen R. Mitroff
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:19
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  18. Cognition and action are often intertwined in everyday life. It is thus pivotal to understand how cognitive processes operate with concurrent actions. The present study aims to assess how simple physical effor...

    Authors: Hyung-Bum Park, Shinhae Ahn and Weiwei Zhang
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:17
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  19. Experts outperform novices on many cognitive and perceptual tasks. Extensive training has tuned experts to the most relevant information in their specific domain, allowing them to make decisions quickly and ac...

    Authors: Samuel G. Robson, Jason M. Tangen and Rachel A. Searston
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:16
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  20. Visual inspection of luggage using X-ray technology at airports is a time-sensitive task that is often supported by automated systems to increase performance and reduce workload. The present study evaluated ho...

    Authors: Tobias Rieger, Lydia Heilmann and Dietrich Manzey
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:12
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  21. CCTV plays a prominent role in public security, health and safety. Monitoring large arrays of CCTV camera feeds is a visually and cognitively demanding task. Arranging the scenes by geographical proximity in t...

    Authors: Benjamin W. Tatler
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:11
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  22. According to the Gricean Maxim of Quantity, speakers provide the amount of information listeners require to correctly interpret an utterance, and no more (Grice in Logic and conversation, 1975). However, speak...

    Authors: Gwendolyn Rehrig, Reese A. Cullimore, John M. Henderson and Fernanda Ferreira
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:10
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  23. Domain-specific expertise changes the way people perceive, process, and remember information from that domain. This is often observed in visual domains involving skilled searches, such as athletics referees, o...

    Authors: Megan H. Papesh, Michael C. Hout, Juan D. Guevara Pinto, Arryn Robbins and Alexis Lopez
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:7
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  24. Over the course of our lifetimes, we accumulate extensive experience associating the things that we see with the words we have learned to describe them. As a result, adults engaged in a visual search task will...

    Authors: Sarah Chabal, Sayuri Hayakawa and Viorica Marian
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2021 6:2
    Content type: Brief report Published on: