Hayward Godwin

University of Southampton · Department of Psychology

When engaged in a visual search for two targets, participants are slower and less accurate in their responses, relative to their performance when searching for singular targets. Previous work on this "dual-target cost" has primarily focused on the breakdown of attentional guidance when looking for two items. Here, we investigated how object identif...

Previous research has shown that during visual search tasks target prevalence (the proportion of trials in which a target appears) influences both the probability that a target will be detected, and the speed at which participants will quit searching and provide an 'absent' response. When prevalence is low (e.g., target presented on 2 % of trials),...

The proportion of trials on which a target is presented (referred to as the target prevalence) during visual search influences the probability that the target will be detected. As prevalence increases, participants become biased toward reporting that the target is present. This bias results in an increase in detection rates for the target, coupled...

Using a visual search task, we explored how behavior is influenced by both visual and semantic information. We recorded participants' eye movements as they searched for a single target number in a search array of single-digit numbers (0-9). We examined the probability of fixating the various distractors as a function of two key dimensions: the visu...

It has previously been argued that, during visual search, eye movement behavior is indicative of an underlying scanning "strategy" that starts on a global, or "coarse," scale but then progressively focuses to a more local, or "fine," scale. This conclusion is motivated by the finding that, as a trial progresses, fixation durations tend to increase...

Visual search is the act of looking for—and hopefully finding—something that is important or that you need. You probably do this every day, like when you must find your backpack before heading off to school. Sometimes you can find what you are looking for just by using your eyes, but other times also you have to use your hands, like when you are lo...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an increase in mental ill health compared with prepandemic levels. Longer-term trajectories of depression in adults during the pandemic remain unclear. Objective We used latent growth curve modelling to examine individual trajectories of depression symptoms, and their predictors, beyond the early stage o...

In many important search tasks, observers must find what they are looking for using only visual information (e.g., X-ray baggage screening/medical screening). However, numerous other search tasks can only be effectively completed when the searcher uses their hands to find what they are looking for (e.g., “rummage” search). Unfortunately, it is not...

Examining eye movement behavior during visual search is an increasingly popular approach for gaining insights into the moment-to-moment processing that takes place when we look for targets in our environment. In this tutorial review, we describe a set of pitfalls and considerations that are important for researchers—both experienced and new to the...

In a typical visual search task, participants search for single targets amongst displays containing non-overlapping objects that are presented on a single depth plane. Recent work has begun to examine displays containing overlapping objects that are presented on different depth planes to one another. It has been found that searching displays contai...

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is one of the most debilitating health conditions in the world. There has been a vast amount of research into factors that increase the likelihood of developing OCD and there are several explanatory models. Current cognitive models of OCD can be split into appraisal‐based and self‐doubt models. To date, Cognitive...

There has been an increasing drive to understand failures in searches for weapons and explosives in X-ray baggage screening. Tracking eye movements during the search has produced new insights into the guidance of attention during the search, and the identification of targets once they are fixated. Here, we review the eye-movement literature that ha...

There has been an increasing drive to understand failures in searches for weapons and explosives in X-ray baggage screening. Tracking eye movements during the search has produced new insights into the guidance of attention during the search, and the identification of targets once they are fixated. Here, we review the eye-movement literature that ha...

Previous research has demonstrated that when monitoring dynamically changing visual displays for color targets, contingencies between targets and distractors facilitate predictive target detection, and elevated intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and lower verbal working memory capacity (WMC) are associated with a higher false alarm rate (see Muhl-Rich...

The spectatorship of portraits by naïve viewers (beholders) was explored in a singleexperiment. Twenty-five participants rated their liking for 142 portraits painted by Courbet (36 paintings), Fantin-Latour (36 paintings) and Manet (70 paintings) on a 4-point Likert scale. The portraits were classified in terms of focussed versus ambiguous nature o...

Target onsets in dynamically changing displays can be predicted when contingencies exist between different stimulus states over time. In the present study, we examined predictive monitoring when participants searched dynamically changing displays of numbers and colored squares for a color target, a number target or both. Stimuli were presented in b...

Rummage search is the visual and haptic search of complex environments for targets. In this study, rummage search was explored using a novel analytic framework with expert dyads and novice dyads, as well as novice individuals. Participants sought an unknown number of targets placed in four rooms of a residential house. Some targets were plainly vis...

Many jobs now involve the monitoring visual representations of data that change over time. Monitoring dynamically changing displays for the onset of targets can be done in two ways: detecting targets directly post their onset or predicting their onset from the prior state of distractors. In the present study, participants’ eye movements were measur...

Unlike in laboratory visual search tasks-wherein participants are typically presented with a pictorial representation of the item they are asked to seek out-in real-world searches, the observer rarely has veridical knowledge of the visual features that define their target. During categorical search, observers look for any instance of a categoricall...

The Functional Visual Field (FVF) offers explanatory power. To us, it relates to existing literature on the flexibility of attentional focus in visual search and reading (Eriksen & St. James 1986; McConkie & Rayner 1975). The target article promotes reflection on existing findings. Here we consider the FVF as a mechanism in the Prevalence Effect (P...

Hemispatial Neglect (HN) is a failure to allocate attention to a region of space opposite to where damage has occurred in the brain, usually the left side of space. It is widely documented that there are two types of neglect: egocentric neglect (neglect of information falling on the individual’s left side) and allocentric neglect (neglect of the le...

Standard models of visual search have focused upon asking participants to search for a single target in displays where the objects do not overlap one another, and where the objects are presented on a single depth plane. This stands in contrast to many everyday visual searches wherein variations in overlap and depth are the norm, rather than the exc...

The efficiency of visual search for one (single-target) and either of two (dual-target) unfamiliar faces was explored to understand the manifestations of capacity and guidance limitations in face search. The visual similarity of distractor faces to target faces was manipulated using morphing (Experiments 1 and 2) and multidimensional scaling (Exper...

A number of real-world search tasks (i.e. police search, detection of improvised explosive devices (IEDs)) require searchers to search exhaustively across open ground. In the present study, we simulated this problem by asking individuals (Experiments 1a and 1b) and dyads (Experiment 2) to search for coin targets pseudo-randomly located in a bounded...

We explored the influence of early scene analysis and visible object characteristics on eye movements when searching for objects in photographs of scenes. On each trial, participants were shown sequentially either a scene preview or a uniform grey screen (250 ms), a visual mask, the name of the target and the scene, now including the target at a li...

Two experiments are reported investigating oculomotor behavior and linguistic processing when reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text (compared to reading normal static text). Three factors known to modulate processing time in normal reading were investigated: Word length and word frequency were examined in Experiment 1, and target word predict...

In standard visual search tasks, targets appear on 50% of trials. This contrasts with real-world searches in which targets can be very rare indeed, such as airport screening. Previous work examining target prevalence (defined as the proportion of trials that contain a target) has found that, as prevalence increases, participants become increasingly...

Previously (VSS 2015) we presented data from two experiments showing a cost in dual-target search for two unfamiliar faces, in which accuracy was lower than searching for the faces separately. Guidance of attention towards target-similar items in dual-target search was very limited at most. In these experiments we manipulated the visual similarity...

Does being able to predict forthcoming scenes facilitate target detection? We report a study that explores this issue. Targets were shown in 40 photographs of real-world scenes, with participants learning the set of photographs across eight presentations. The scenes were taken from positions along a route. The repeating sequences were structured to...

A number of real-world scenarios involve pairs or teams of individuals searching collaboratively for complex targets. In an attempt to examine these types of scenarios, our recent research has demonstrated that, relative to a solo searcher, collaborative searchers exhibit higher response accuracy when engaged in complex visual search tasks. In the...

To search for targets in scenes filled with distractors, observers must utilize mental representations ("templates") for those targets (e.g. where are my keys). While previous research on "hybrid search" has demonstrated that observers can search for any of hundreds of distinct targets, little is known about the internal representation of those tar...

Previous work showed that prior experience with discriminations requiring configural solutions (e.g., biconditional discrimination) confers an advantage for the learning of new configural discriminations (e.g., negative patterning) in comparison to prior experience with elemental discriminations. This effect is well established but its mechanism is...

In press. The Functional Visual Field (FVF) offers explanatory power. To us, it relates to existing literature on the flexibility of attentional focus in visual search and reading (Eriksen & St. James, 1986; McConkie & Rayner, 1975). The target article promotes reflection on existing findings. Here we consider the FVF as a mechanism in the Prevalen...

An important question about eye-movement behavior is when the decision is made to terminate a fixation and program the following saccade. Different approaches have found converging evidence in favor of a mixed-control account, in which there is some overlap between processing information at fixation and planning the following saccade. We examined o...

Behavior in visual search tasks is influenced by the proportion of trials on which a target is presented (the target prevalence). Previous research has shown that when target prevalence is low (2 % prevalence), participants tend to miss targets, as compared with higher prevalence levels (e.g., 50 % prevalence). There is an ongoing debate regarding...

Visual search is one of the most widely studied topics in vision science, both as an independent topic of interest, and as a tool for studying attention and visual cognition. A wide literature exists that seeks to understand how people find things under varying conditions of difficulty and complexity, and in situations ranging from the mundane (e.g...

Experiments exploring visual search in familiar real-world scenes usually consider target detection in individual scenes. They rarely consider the influence of the relationship between sequences of scenes on target detection. Specifically, they do not consider how the ability to predict the form and structure of a forthcoming scene influences targe...

Stress, worry and anxiety have long been known to influence a broad array of behavioral functions. Here, we examined how stress influences fixational stability. Fixational stability is known to be heightened in experts (e.g., snipers; Di Russo et al., 2003), but impoverished both in individuals with pathological attention deficits (e.g., ADHD; Muno...

Visual search is slower and less accurate when trying to find more than one target object, referred to as the dual-target cost, and reduced attentional guidance has been shown to be the cause (e.g. Menneer et al., 2012). Studies in the eye-witness domain have shown the presence of two target faces reduces accuracy of identifying a single target fac...

During everyday visual search tasks, such as searching for keys in a cluttered room, it is commonplace for objects to overlap one another and occur at different levels of depth. This situation stands in contrast to standard search tasks in which objects are presented on a single depth plane and do not overlap with one another. We previously examine...

Standard visual search tasks present participants with objects that do not change. This contrasts with some real-world tasks where observers monitor complex displays of dynamically changing visual indicators over time for evidence of risk (e.g. warning lights turning red). In these tasks, target detection may be driven by responses to specific targ...

Various real-world tasks require careful and exhaustive visual search. For example, searching for forensic evidence or signs of hidden threats (what we call hard-to-find targets). Here, we examine how search accuracy for hard-to-find targets is influenced by search behaviour. Participants searched for coins set amongst a 5m x 15m (defined as x and...

We examined the influence of experience upon information-sampling and decision-making behaviour in a group of military personnel as they conducted risk assessments of scenes photographed from patrol routes during the recent conflict in Afghanistan. Their risk assessment was based on an evaluation of Potential Risk Indicators (PRIs) during examinati...

Visual search is a task that is carried out in a number of important security and health related scenarios (e.g., X-ray baggage screening, radiography). With recent and ongoing developments in the technology available to present images to observers in stereoscopic depth, there has been increasing interest in assessing whether depth information can...

Background Attentional biases for pain-related information have been frequently reported in individuals with chronic pain. Recording of participants' eye movements provides a continuous measure of attention, although to date this methodology has received little use in research exploring attentional biases in chronic pain. The aim of the current inv...

Some real-world tasks involve observers visually searching in pairs or teams (e.g. searching buildings for weapons). One issue that has not yet been explored is how search behaviour adapts or shifts when a partner in a pair shows signs of missing targets or making false alarms. In the present study, we examined participants' eye movements and behav...

Using a visual search task, we examined the combined effects of overlap and three-dimensional depth on search performance. Participants searched through displays containing opaque polygon targets while their eye-movements were recorded. Half of the participants searched displays with objects presented at different depth planes to one another (the m...

Art-historical accounts of the last 200 years identify developments in the types, or “modes,” of address that a picture can present to a viewer as critical to the experience and evaluation of paintings. The authors focus on “anti-theatrical” theories of pictorial address and the complex and innovative “double relation” of absorption and acknowledgm...

We review the literature on the relation between narcissism and consumer behavior. Consumer behavior is sometimes guided by self-related motives (e.g., self-enhancement) rather than by rational economic considerations. Narcissism is a case in point. This personality trait reflects a self-centered, self-aggrandizing, dominant, and manipulative orien...

Previous research has demonstrated that chronic pain is associated with biased processing of pain related information. Most studies examined this bias by measuring response latencies. The present study extended previous work by recording eye movement behaviour in individuals with chronic headache and healthy controls, while participants viewed a se...

It has not yet been established whether hemispatial neglect, the failure to respond to contralesional information after stroke, occurs due to an information sampling deficit or impaired processing of contralateral information during fixation. To address this, we recorded eye movements of acute (<3 months post-stroke) neglect patients (NPs), stroke...

We examined the strength of activation of different target templates during a dual-target visual search task. We manipulated the proportion of trials where each target was presented (known as the target prevalence) in order to assess whether target templates are shaped by regularities in the environment. We recorded participants’ eye movement behav...

We compared expert and novice behaviour in a group of participants as they engaged in a simulated maritime driving task. We varied the difficulty of the driving task by controllling the severity of the sea state in which they were driving their craft. Increases in sea severity increased the size of the upcoming waves while also increasing the lengt...

We compared expert and novice behaviour in a group of participants as they engaged in a simulated maritime driving task. We varied the difficulty of the driving task by controlling the severity of the sea state in which they were driving their craft. Increases in sea severity increased the size of the upcoming waves while also decreasing the distan...

We assessed fixation planning in visual search in two experiments by tracking participants' eye movements while they each searched for a simple target (a T shape) among a set of distractors (L shapes). On some trials, the search display was briefly interrupted with a blank screen and, following a randomly determined period of elapsed time, the sear...

Searching simultaneously for metal threats (guns and knives) and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in X-ray images is less effective than 2 independent single-target searches, 1 for metal threats and 1 for IEDs. The goals of this study were to (a) replicate this dual-target cost for categorical targets and to determine whether the cost remains wh...

Using scenes taken from the recent conflict in Afghanistan, we explored the search and eye movement behaviour of a group of military personnel as they assessed whether they believed that the scenes contained an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). The threat assessment was based on an evaluation of Threat Indicators (TIs) during examination of each s...

The Thatcher illusion (Thompson, 1980) is considered to be a prototypical illustration of the notion that face perception is dependent on configural processes and representations. We explored this idea by examining the relative contributions of perceptual and decisional processes to the ability of observers to identify the orientation of two classe...

To investigate whether hemispatial neglect arises due to an information sampling deficit or impaired processing of information on the left we measured eye movements of stroke patients whilst they completed a sub-set of the Behavioural Inattention Test (BIT; Wilson et al., 1987, Behavioural Inattention Test. Suffolk, UK: Thames Valley Test Company)...

Recent studies have shown that the prevalence of target presentation in visual search has an impact on target detection rates, and also that searching for two targets leads to a decrement in performance (the “dual-target cost”). In the present experiments, we added to previous work that has examined the interaction between the prevalence effect and...

Behavioural studies using the Thatcher illusion are usually assumed to demonstrate configurality in upright face processing. Previously, we have reported on PHD, an individual with prosopagnosia, could not discriminate Thatcherized faces but showed some evidence for residual face processing (VSS, 08). Recent functional imaging data suggests a role...

Behavioural studies using the Thatcher illusion are usually assumed to demonstrate configurality in upright face processing. Previously, we have reported on PHD, an individual with prosopagnosia, could not discriminate Thatcherized faces but showed some evidence for residual face processing (VSS, 09). Recent functional imaging data suggests a role...

Previous studies have demonstrated that searching simultaneously for two dissimilar targets is very inefficient compared to searching separately for each target. This study investigated how this multiple-target cost interacts with the relative frequency of the appearance of two target classes. Response accuracy was measured during simultaneous sear...

Previous studies have demonstrated a dual-target cost in visual search. In the current study, the relationship between search for one and search for two targets was investigated to examine the effects of target prevalence and practice. Color-shape conjunction stimuli were used with response time, accuracy and signal detection measures. Performance...

Recent studies have demonstrated the important role of working memory in conducting effective visual search. The present study examined the role that the central executive plays in visual search, which is believed to be necessary for high-level control and coordination in search, as well as storing task- and target-related information. Performance...

The probability of target presentation in visual search tasks influences target detection performance: this is known as the prevalence effect (Wolfe et al., 2005). Additionally, searching for several targets simultaneously reduces search performance: this is known as the dual-target cost (DTC: Menneer et al., 2007). The interaction between the DTC...

The Thatcher illusion (Thompson, 1980) is considered to be a prototypical illustration of the notion that face perception is dependent on configural processes and representations. We explore this idea by examining the relative contributions of perceptual and decisional processes to the ability of observers to identify the orientation of two classes...

The visual search task carried out by X-ray screening personnel has begun to be investigated in a number of recent experiments. The goal of the present thesis was, therefore, to extend previous examinations of the factors that may be detrimental to screener performance, to understand those factors in more detail, and to bring those factors to bear...