Specifying the precision of guiding features for visual search.

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Why is it important?

Many real-world tasks involve visual search, including critical safety tasks such as luggage screening and finding tumors in x-rays. This study demonstrates that the mental representations used to direct eye movements and attention to targets in such tasks are much less precise than previously believed: when shown a picture preview of the search target, participants used little of the information from the preview. Whenever color could be used to find a target, little other than color information was used—even when the color information was likely to be invalid, and when other information could be used effectively.