M Pilar Aivar¹ (), Laura Cepero¹, Enrique Heredia-Aguado², Alejandro Rujano³, Rocio Asperilla Ruiz¹, Victoria Plaza¹; ¹Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, ²Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche, ³Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

In everyday life we continuously search for specific objects in our environment. However, much of what we know about visual search comes from studies performed using computer-based tasks. To test whether our knowledge regarding the characteristics of visual search applies to natural situations we performed a series of experiments in which participants searched for real 3D objects. As targets and distractors, we used a collection of plastic figures of different shapes and colors that were placed on a rectangular frame. The task we employed was repeated visual search: the display was kept constant over trials, but a different piece was presented as target in each trial. Participants searched for 10 different pieces a total of six times. They had to point to the correct piece in each trial, and we recorded their eye movements during the complete task. Results showed that target repetition led to a decrease in the time needed to find the different pieces, replicating the effects that have been seen on computer versions of this task. This suggests that participants rapidly acquire and rely on stable spatial information to guide their search. After 3 blocks of trials the complete frame was inverted, so that all pieces changed location. This disruption showed that learning was location-specific: when spatial consistency was lost, performance dropped, indicating that participants’ strategies depended on memory for object locations rather than purely on visual features. The recovery of performance once the original configuration was used again further supports the idea that spatial knowledge is robust and can guide visual search efficiently. Overall, these findings extend classic repeated-search effects to real-world settings, showing that natural search behavior is strongly shaped by learned spatial regularities.

Acknowledgements: Research supported by grant PID2024-155632NB-I00