Developing a collaborative framework for naturalistic visual search

While much research has investigated the mechanisms of visual search behaviour in laboratory-based computer tasks, there has been relatively little work on whether these results generalise to more naturalistic search tasks and thus how well existing theories explain real-world search behaviour. In addition, work relating to this question has often been carried out by researchers working in very different disciplines, including not just vision science but also fields such as consumer behaviour, sports science and medical science, making it more difficult to get an overview of the progress made and open questions remaining. We present findings from a systematic review of real-world visual search, showing that we can group the current literature into theoretical and applied approaches, and that there are certain well-studied topics (e.g., X-ray screening) but that there are relatively few links made across different search tasks and/or search contexts. We also present preliminary work detailing our development of a “naturalistic search task battery”, which aims to provide a suite of open source, reproducible and standardised real-world search tasks, thus enabling the generation of comparable data across multiple studies and aiding theory and modelling in this area