Visual search has no memory

Abstract

Humans spend a lot of time searching for things, such as roadside traffic signs¹, soccer balls² or tumours in mammograms³. These tasks involve the deployment of attention from one item in the visual field to the next. Common sense suggests that rejected items should be noted in some fashion so that effort is not expended in re-examining items that have been attended to and rejected. However, common sense is wrong. Here we asked human observers to search for a letter ‘T’ among letters ‘L’. This search demandsvisual attention and normally proceeds at a rate of 20–30 milliseconds per item⁴. In the critical condition, we randomly relocated all letters every 111 milliseconds. This made it impossible for the subjects to keep track of the progress of the search. Nevertheless, the efficiency of the search was unchanged. Theories of visual search all assume that search relies on accumulating information about the identity of objects over time^5,6,7. Such theories predict that search efficiency will be drastically reduced if the scene is continually shuffled while the observer is trying to search through it. As we show that efficiency is not impaired, the standard theories must be revised.