What Are the Shapes of Response Time Distributions in Visual Search?

Overview

Journal J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform

Specialty Psychology

Date 2010 Nov 25

PMID 21090905

Citations 50

Authors

Evan M Palmer

Todd S Horowitz

Antonio Torralba

Jeremy M Wolfe

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Many visual search experiments measure response time (RT) as their primary dependent variable. Analyses typically focus on mean (or median) RT. However, given enough data, the RT distribution can be a rich source of information. For this paper, we collected about 500 trials per cell per observer for both target-present and target-absent displays in each of three classic search tasks: feature search, with the target defined by color; conjunction search, with the target defined by both color and orientation; and spatial configuration search for a 2 among distractor 5s. This large data set allows us to characterize the RT distributions in detail. We present the raw RT distributions and fit several psychologically motivated functions (ex-Gaussian, ex-Wald, Gamma, and Weibull) to the data. We analyze and interpret parameter trends from these four functions within the context of theories of visual search.

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