Matthew S. Cain

Visual Attention Lab, Brigham & Women’s Hospital

The Role of Working Memory in Multiple-Target Visual Search

 

When searching a scene where more than one target may be present, working memory has a greater impact on performance than it does in search for a single target. In particular, found targets appear to consume working memory resources that would otherwise be dedicated to search, contributing to increased miss rates for other targets (i.e., Subsequent Search Misses). Using three lines of multiple-target search experiments I will show how the intrinsic working memory load of a search experiment can be altered by factors such as anticipatory anxiety, the removal of found targets from the display, and splitting up searches across trials.