Guided search 2.0 - a revised model of visual-search

An important component of routine visual behavior is the ability to find one item in a visual world filled with other, distracting items. This ability to perform visual search has been the sub-ject of a large body of research in the past 15 years. This paper reviews the visual search litera-ture and presents a model ofhuman search behavior. Built upon the work ofNeisser, Treisman, Julesz, and others, the model distinguishes between a preattentive, massively parallel stage that processes information about basic visual features (color, motion, various depth cues, etc.) across large portions of the.visual field and a subsequent limited-capacity stage that performs other, more complex operations (e.g., face recognition, reading, object identification) over a limited por-tion of the visual field. The spatial deployment of the Iimited-capacity process is under atten-tional control. The heart of the guided search model is the idea that attentional deployment of limited resources is guided by the output ofthe earlier parallel processes. Guided Search 2.0 (GS2) is arevision of the model in which virtually all aspects of the model have been made more ex-plicit andJor revised in light of new data. The paper is organized into four parts: Part 1 presents the model and the details of its computer simulation. Part 2 reviews the visual search literature on preattentive processing ofbasic features and shows how the GS2 simulation reproduces thos