Situating visual search

Visual search attracted great interest because its ease under certain circumstances seemed to provide a way to understand how properties of early visual cortical areas could explain complex perception without resorting to higher order psychological or neurophysiological mechanisms. Furthermore, there was the hope that properties of visual search itself might even reveal new cortical features or dimensions. The shortcomings of this perspective suggest that we abandon fixed canonical elementary particles of vision as well as a corresponding simple to complex cognitive architecture for vision. Instead recent research has suggested a different organization of the visual brain with putative high level processing occurring very rapidly and often unconsciously. Given this outlook, we reconsider visual search under the broad category of recognition tasks, each having different trade-offs for computational resources, between detail and scope. We conclude noting recent trends showing how visual search is relevant to a wider range of issues in cognitive science, in particular to memory, decision making, and reward.

Research highlights► Inadequacy of image based accounts of visual search. ► Visual search as object recognition. ► Visual search and reinforcement learning.