In an earlier study, Brown and Monk (1975) defined the area of display immediately adjacent to the target to be the “target surround”. Using highly specific configurations of nontargets in the target surround, they showed that congested target surrounds act to camouflage the target. The present study tests these results under more general conditions where no specific configurations are enforced. A linear increasing function is found between geometric mean search time and target surround density, using three measures of the latter. The implication of this result to studies of overall nontarget density is discussed.
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