The Influence of Attention, Learning, and Motivation on Visual Search

Visual search is one of our most ubiquitous activities, as anyone who has had a “Where’s my car?” moment can attest. Attending to relevant stimuli while screening out distractions requires a complex set of interactions between visual, neurological, and behavioral processes. While recent years have seen digital technologies both enhance our visual search experiences and present more intricate visual challenges in our everyday lives, advances in research are quickly catching up with the real world.

The Influence of Attention, Learning, and Motivation on Visual Search brings together a number of exciting lines of inquiry into this topic. In keeping with the near-limitless set of variables that influence search, contributors represent scholarship in laboratory and applied settings, cognitive processes intimately involved in search, and related concepts from a variety of disciplines. Chapters delve into current studies on a wide range of component factors relating to search, including:

•             Searching in space and time.

•             Automatic control of visual selection.

•             Guidance of visual search by memory and knowledge.

•             Reward and attentional control in visual search.

•             Statistical learning and its consequences.

•             Overcoming hurdles in translating visual data between the lab and the field.

•             The search termination problem in visual search.

For cognitive and social psychologists, The Influence of Attention, Learning, and Motivation on Visual Search is a stimulating volume that holds multiple possibilities for future developments across a number of behavioral and cognitive domains, from decision-making to problem-solving, from autism and other cognitive deficits to the effects of aging.