Introduction: It has been suggested that cognitive characteristics may affect search. This study investigated how decoding abilities, short-term memory capacity and rapid automatised naming skills relate to query formulation. Method: A total of twenty dyslexic participants and twenty non-dyslexic controls completed four standardised cognitive…

When searching for a "pop-out" target, interference from a salient but irrelevant distractor can be reduced or even prevented under certain circumstances. Here, five experiments were conducted to further our understanding of three different aspects of top-down interference reduction: first, whether or not qualitatively different search modes can…

When observers search for a target object, they incidentally learn the identities and locations of "background" objects in the same display. This learning can facilitate search performance, eliciting faster reaction times for repeated displays. Despite these findings, visual search has been successfully modeled using architectures that maintain no…

In recent studies, researchers have discovered a larger neural activation for stimuli that are more extreme exemplars of their stimulus class, compared with stimuli that are more prototypical. This has been shown for faces as well as for familiar and novel shape classes. We used a visual search task to look for a behavioral correlate of these…

Set size and crowding affect search efficiency by limiting attention for recognition and attention against competition; however, these factors can be difficult to quantify in complex search tasks. The current experiments use a quantitative measure of the amount and variability of visual information (i.e., clutter) in highly complex stimuli (i.e.,…

Contextual cuing experiments show that when displays are repeated, reaction times to find a target decrease over time even when observers are not aware of the repetition. It has been thought that the context of the display guides attention to the target. The authors tested this hypothesis by comparing the effects of guidance in a standard…

An online demonstration, designed to enhance comprehension of Sternberg's (1966) short-term memory scanning task, involved rapidly searching under virtual cups for a ball. We randomly assigned students to 1 of 3 groups, all of whom read the same textbook description of Sternberg's work: A demonstration group used 3 search methods to look for balls…

Trained 1- to 3-year-olds to touch a video screen displaying a unique target and appearing among varying numbers of distracters; correct responses triggered a sound and four animated objects on the screen. Found that children's reaction time patterns resembled those from adults in corresponding search tasks, suggesting that basic perceptual…

Discusses the evaluation of search engines and uses neural networks in stochastic simulation of the number of rejected Web pages per search query. Topics include the iterative radial basis functions (RBF) neural network; precision; response time; coverage; Boolean logic; regression models; crawling algorithms; and implications for search engine…

Explores response time variations in National Library of Medicine's ELHILL bibliographic search system and analyzes statistical significance of response time in terms of its variations by day of week, hour of day, particular bibliographic file being searched, command issued by user, number of users logged onto system. Ten references are cited.…

Discussion of the use of CD-ROM databases for end-user searching versus online database searching in academic libraries focuses on a comparison of two databases, "Psychological Abstracts" and "Sociological Abstracts," that were searched in both formats. Factors of response time, coverage, content, and cost were investigated for…