{"pk":26961,"title":"Target-to-distractor similarity can help visual search performance","subtitle":null,"abstract":"We found an unexpected positive effect of target-to-distractorsimilarity (TD) in a visual search task, despite overwhelmingevidence in the literature that TD similarity hurts visual searchperformance. Participants with no prior knowledge of Chineseperformed 12 hour-long sessions over 4 weeks, where they hadto find a briefly presented target character among a set ofdistractors. At the beginning of the experiment, TD similarityhurt performance, but the effect reversed during the firstsession and remained positive throughout the remainingsessions. We present a simple connectionist model thataccounts for that reversal of TD similarity effects on visualsearch and we discuss possible theoretical explanations.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"visual search; learning; similarity; connectionistmodel; neural network"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3md8d693","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Vencislav","middle_name":"","last_name":"Popov","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon University","department":""},{"first_name":"Lynne","middle_name":"","last_name":"Reder","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26961/galley/16597/download/"}]}