Experience-Guided Search: A Theory of Attentional Control

People perform a remarkable range of tasks that require search of the visual en- vironment for a target item among distractors. The Guided Search model (Wolfe, 1994, 2007), or GS, is perhaps the best developed psychological account of hu- man visual search. To prioritize search, GS assigns saliency to locations in the visual field. Saliency is a linear combination of activations from retinotopic maps representing primitive visual features. GS includes heuristics for setting the gain coefficient associated with each map.