Exploring visual search: past and current insights

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.26650/SP2024-1455510

The visual search paradigm is a fundamental concept in cognitive psychology and neuroscience that seeks to understand how people perceive and recognize specific items in visually complex environments. It also serves as a fundamental tool for understanding cognitive mechanisms such as attentional processes, information processing, and environmental awareness. This paradigm is widely used in laboratory settings with consistent stimuli to gain a better understanding of the factors that influence visual perception and attention. In addition, visual search plays a significant role in our daily lives, particularly in social interactions. Although the phrase visual search has been used in scientific literature since the 1940s, its use as a technique in visual cognitive science research only began in the 1970s. It was not until the 1980s, pioneered by Tresiman and Galade, that visual search became a research field on its own, gaining significant popularity among visual perception scientists in the early 1990s. The current definition of visual search, which remains accepted and quoted to date, was introduced by Wolfe and Horowitz in 2008. Since then, studies in the field have continued to be carried out without slowing down. Today, the visual search paradigm not only remains an active research area of cognitive psychology and neuroscience but also a diagnostic approach in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder. In this paper, we review the evolution of the visual search paradigm from the 1980s to the present, discussing the principles and mechanisms that have been accepted by the scientific community thus far. Additionally, we review studies that have been conducted using this paradigm on the topics of visual perception and attention, categorizing them into research areas.