An Investigation of Attentional and Inhibitory Processes During Active Visual Search in Humans

The goal of this study is to investigate the finding that there are large individual differences in how participants move their eyes during active visual search. For example, some individuals tend to fixate, that is point their eyes steadily at a single location, for longer than other individuals before moving to another location. This experiment will use behavioral tasks to measure an individual's attentional and inhibitory functioning, and then see how each of these contributes to between-participant variability in eye movement behavior during visual search.

To accomplish the goal of understanding the source of individual variability in eye movement patterns, each participant will complete three separate tasks. The first task will require participants to find a target and eye movements will be measured to assess individual differences in fixation duration and other types of eye movement behavior. A second task will evaluate attentional functioning over the visual field by requiring participants to detect briefly-presented targets using their peripheral vision. Finally, a third task will assess inhibitory functioning by having participants attempt to stop eye movements after they have been programmed.