Abstract
The study of memory in search has emerged from the observation that real world environments possess an inherent temporal stability, whereby an object’s past position is often predictive of its future position. Much work has explored the various factors which encourage or discourage observers from leveraging this stability to help guide search. A related, but comparatively understudied property of real search environments is that the arrangement of objects is frequently produced and actively modified by the searchers themselves. Here we introduce a novel task designed to study this interplay between organization and search. We demonstrate how order emerges in search environments through both incidental and deliberate behaviours, how the sequential statistics of target streams come to be reflected in spatial groupings, and how individual differences in organizational tendencies are related to performance.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015