Interruption in visual search: a systematic review.

Visual search, the process of trying to find a target presented among distractors, is a much-studied cognitive task. Less well-studied is the condition in which the search task is interrupted before the target is found. The consequences of such interruptions in visual search have been investigated across various disciplines, which has resulted in diverse and at times contradictory findings. The aim of this systematic review is to provide a more cohesive understanding of the effects of interruptions in visual search. For this purpose, we identified 28 studies that met our inclusion criteria. To facilitate a more organized and comprehensive analysis, we grouped the studies based on three dimensions: the search environment, the interruption aftermath, and the type of the interrupting event. While interruptions in visual search are variable and manifest differently across studies, our review provides a foundational scheme for a more cohesive understanding of the subject. This categorization serves as a starting point for exploring potential future directions, which we delineate in our conclusions.

The impact of different distractions on outdoor visual search and object memory.

We investigated whether and how different types of search distractions affect visual search behavior and target memory while participants searched in a real-world environment. They searched either undistracted (control condition), listened to a podcast (auditory distraction), counted down aloud at intervals of three while searching (executive working memory load), or were forced to stop the search on half of the trials (time pressure). In line with findings from laboratory settings, participants searched longer but made fewer errors when the target was absent than when it was present, regardless of distraction condition. Furthermore, compared to the auditory distraction condition, the executive working memory load led to higher error rates (but not longer search times). In a surprise memory test after the end of the search tasks, recognition was better for previously present targets than for absent targets. Again, this was regardless of the previous distraction condition, although significantly fewer targets were remembered by the participants in the executive working memory load condition than by those in the control condition. The findings suggest that executive working memory load, but likely not auditory distraction and time pressure affected visual search performance and target memory in a real-world environment.