Guided Search 6.0: An upgrade with five forms of guidance, three types of functional visual fields, and two, distinct search templates

The Guided Search (GS) model of visual search was published 30 years ago. The core idea of GS is that search becomes more efficient when deployments of attention are guided by preattentive information. As new data about search accumulated, GS needed modification. Revisions have been numbered so that outdated ideas that seemed reasonable in 1989 don’t need to be defended in 2020. This talk on the new GS6 will focus on three topics: 1) Five Sources of Guidance: Early versions of GS focused on top-down (user-driven) and bottom-up (salience) guidance by basic features (color, orientation, etc). Subsequent research adds guidance by history of search, “value” of the target, and, most importantly, scene structure and meaning. 2) Three “Functional Visual Fields”: Visual and attentional processing are better nearer the point of fixation. This fact is captured in the idea of a Functional Visual Field (FVF) surrounding fixation. The FVF is typically treated as a single thing (notably in medical image perception). In fact, it is important to distinguish at least three, distinct co-occurring FVFs governing visual resolution, overt oculomotor exploration, and covert attentional selection. 3) In order to search, you need a representation of search target(s). This search “template” is usually discussed as though it (like the FVF) is a single mental representation. However, it is important in GS6 to distinguish between two representations: A “guiding template” that helps to direct attention to candidate targets and a “target template” that allows us to determine if a candidate is, indeed, the target. GS6 proposes that the guiding template resides in Working Memory while the target template resides in Activated Long Term Memory. I will present new data on these three topics and show how they contribute to the overall structure of Guided Search 6.0.