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Eye and Head Movements in Visual Search in the Extended Field of View
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Description: This repo includes the raw data files from 2 VR visual search experiments from the manuscript: "Eye and Head Movements in Visual Search in the Extended Field of View" Abstract: In natural environments, head movements are required to search for objects outside the current field of view (FoV). Here we investigate the power of a salient target in an extended visual search array to facilitate faster detection once this item comes into the FoV by a head movement. We conducted two virtual reality experiments using spatially clustered sets of stimuli to observe target detection and head and eye movements during visual search. Participants completed a search task with three conditions: (1) target set in the initial FoV, (2) head movement needed to bring the target set into the FoV, (3) same as condition 2 but the target set was initially hidden and then suddenly appeared after the head movement had brought the location of the target set into the FoV. We measured the search time until participants found a more salient (O) or less salient (T) target among distractors (L). On average O's were found faster than T's. Gaze analysis showed that this facilitation occurred due to the target guiding the search when the target was visible within the initial FoV. However, when targets required a head movement to enter the FoV, new peripheral visual information did not influence the search strategy and gaze shifts towards the target were not influenced by salience. Instead, faster search times for salient targets were caused by the time required to find the target once the relevant group of stimuli was in the center of FoV. This suggests that perceptual processing of task-relevant saliency differs from traditional visual search on fixed displays when we are actively searching through an extended visual field.