Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In 1998/1999 three participants trained for up to 74 hour long sessions to find a target in visual displays of 1, 2, or 4 objects. There were four targets and four foils that never changed. Displays occurred simultaneously, or the objects occurred successively, or the features of each object occurred successively. When successive, the SOAs were short (17, 33, or 50 ms) so the displays appeared simultaneous, making it likely that the search strategy was the same in all conditions. A 2004 publication examined only the simultaneous condition and found evidence for serial search as well as some small amount of automatic attention to targets, and occasional early or late search termination. A 2021 publication examined only the displays with single objects, obtaining evidence for dynamic perception of features. Building on these results we present a simple dynamic model that explains the main processes operating in all the experimental conditions.