On the Hunt

Abstract

Visual search tasks commonly involve manipulating the number of targets and distractors to change difficulty levels and observe differences in reaction time and accuracy. What happens when the search background itself serves as a distractor? By creating a target that has been camouflaged to match the environment, we observed RT and accuracy both with and without a target preview. We hypothesized that 1) as target size decreased (increasing difficulty), RT would increase and accuracy would decrease, and 2) that the target preview would not aid in search. Our results support for our first hypothesis, and partially support our second. Reaction times were unaffected by the availability of the target preview, but search accuracy displayed a small cost. Overall, our findings suggest that search for camouflaged targets in the real world, in some cases, is predicated on a categorical representation of the target.