Summary: People searching for a missing item can locate it about 20% faster when they implicitly use nonvisual physical properties—such as hardness or softness—to guide their attention.
Source: Johns Hopkins University
Overview
When you’re rushing to find something, it is common to think about color, size, and shape. New research from Johns Hopkins University shows that people also rely on their intuitive knowledge of nonvisual physical properties—attributes you can’t see directly, like hardness or softness—to guide visual search. Even when unaware that they are doing so, observers were faster at finding targets that differed from surrounding items by these latent physical traits.
Researchers in the Dynamic Perception Lab found that observers located everyday objects in clutter roughly 20 percent faster when the target differed from distractors by a physical property such as hardness or softness. The work, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, demonstrates that knowledge of an object’s physical properties helps allocate visual attention in addition to informing how we interact with objects.
What the team tested
The study asked whether people’s internal knowledge about objects’ physical attributes influences where they look and how quickly they spot a specified target in a busy visual scene. The lab’s experiments presented arrays of common objects and instructed participants to locate a named item among distractors.
The researchers manipulated whether the target differed from distractors by perceived hardness versus softness while controlling for many other visual and semantic cues. Across a series of experiments, including four core visual search tests, observers consistently used the hardness distinction to guide search more efficiently, even though none reported being aware that hardness was relevant to the task.
Key findings
- Participants were about 20% faster at finding targets when the target’s latent physical property (hardness/softness) distinguished it from distractors.
- The advantage increased as the number of items in the search array grew, indicating that knowledge of physical properties becomes more helpful in cluttered scenes.
- The benefit persisted when stimuli were simplified to line drawings, showing that full surface texture or curvature cues were not necessary for the effect.
- Eye-tracking data revealed that observers made fewer fixations on distractors and spent less time examining each distractor when the target differed by hardness, demonstrating a measurable change in attention deployment.
Interpretation
Jason Fischer, senior author and cognitive neuroscientist in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins, noted that the findings are striking for vision science because they reveal that knowledge about objects can shape attention in the same way that visible features do. In other words, people’s internal “intuitive physics” of familiar objects — what items typically feel like, how they behave, and how robust or fragile they are — is automatically recruited to prioritize where to look.
Lead author Li Guo, a graduate student, explained that participants implicitly used hardness to avoid being distracted by objects that did not match the target’s physical attribute. For example, when searching for a soft towel in a cluttered room, people unconsciously skip over hard objects and devote attention to softer items, reducing wasted search time.
Why this matters
The results expand our understanding of visual attention by showing that attention is not driven solely by visible features. Instead, observers bring stored knowledge about objects’ physical properties to bear on visual search. This has implications for everyday tasks—packing groceries, searching a messy drawer, or scanning a cluttered shelf—where people routinely rely on both what they see and what they implicitly know about objects.
The Dynamic Perception Lab plans follow-up work to explore how intuitive knowledge of object physics helps people predict future events in a scene, in addition to guiding moment-to-moment attention.
Publication details
The study, titled “Knowledge of objects’ physical properties implicitly guides attention during visual search,” appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. The research is authored by Li Guo, Susan M. Courtney, and Jason Fischer.
About the researchers
Fischer’s Dynamic Perception Lab investigates how people’s intuitive understanding of physical properties and dynamics shapes interaction with everyday environments and the distribution of attention when the visual scene is complex. This study links those research lines by showing that internalized knowledge about weight, hardness, and other nonvisual attributes shifts how observers prioritize visual information.
Media contacts
Johns Hopkins University
Jill Rosen – Johns Hopkins University
Image credit: Jason Fischer/JHU
Original research
Article published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. DOI: 10.1037/xge0000776
Abstract (summary)
The study shows that people implicitly use knowledge of objects’ physical properties to guide visual search. Across experiments, participants located targets more quickly when the target’s physical attribute (hardness or softness) distinguished it from distractors. This effect emerged from making fewer fixations on irrelevant items and spending less time on each distractor. Surface texture and curvature cues were not necessary for the benefit, indicating that observers rely on stored knowledge about objects’ physical traits to allocate attention in visual scenes.
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