Abstract
Searching for your keys can be easy if you know where you put them. But when your daughter loves playing with keys and has the bad habit of just randomly placing them in the fridge or in a pot, your routine search might become a nuisance. What makes search in the real world usually so easy and sometimes so utterly hard? There has been a trend to study visual perception in increasingly more naturalistic settings due to the legit concern that evidence gathered from simple, artificial laboratory experiments does not translate to the real world. For instance, how can one even attempt to measure set size effects in real world search? Does memory play a larger role when having to move your body towards the search target? Do target features even matter when we have scene context to guide our way? In this talk, I will review some of my labs’ latest efforts to study visual search in increasingly realistic environments, the great possibilities of virtual environments, and the new challenges that arise when moving away from highly controlled laboratory settings for the sake of getting real.