Could you find one of your 1000 Facebook friends in a crowd of 100? Even at rates of 20–40 comparisons/sec, determining that no friends were in the crowd would take ~40–50 minutes if memory and visual search interacted linearly. Our observers memorized pictures of 1–100 targets and then searched for any target in visual displays of 1–16 objects. Response times varied linearly with visual set size but l–16 accurately predicted response times for different observers holding 100 objects in memory. The results could support a binary representation of visual objects in memory and are relevant to applied searches in which experts look for any of many items of interest (e.g. medical or airport screening tasks).
展开▼
