The Brains Behind 'Where's Waldo?'

Summary

Areas of Science

Human Behavior

Difficulty

Method

Scientific Method

Time Required

Very Short (≤ 1 day)

Prerequisites

None

Material Availability

Readily available

Cost

Very Low (under $20)

Safety

No issues

Credits

Sara Agee, Ph.D., Science Buddies
Teisha Rowland, Ph.D., Science Buddies

Science Buddies is committed to creating content authored by scientists and educators. Learn more about our process and how we use AI.

Abstract

What makes you notice someone in a crowd? Why do some things stand out, while others melt into the background? In this science project you can investigate the psychology of how things get noticed, by studying how our brains perform a visual search.

Have you ever looked and looked desperately for something? It is so frustrating! The classic example is when I lose my keys. You would think that by now (knowing that I am the kind of person who often loses my keys) I would have a huge, bright red key chain with a blinking strobe light that plays a ring tone every time I lose them. But of course, I still have them on a plain-old key ring. Hence the frustration.

But I can turn this story from lemons into lemonade. It turns out that this frustrating situation is the perfect example of performing what cognitive psychologists call a visual search. During a visual search, an observer (me) looks for a target (my keys) in the midst of distracters (all of the other stuff in my messy house). By making my key chain easier to see, I could have improved upon my visual search, and made my search more successful.

What properties are important for performing a successful visual search? Try this quick activity to help you think about the variables. In which of the two images in Figure 1 below can you find the red letter "T" the fastest?

 
Figure 1. Which side has the easier task? (Busey, date unknown)

It was probably the image on the left. The image on the right has more complex distracters than the image on the left, making finding the target (the red letter "T") more difficult.

For a science project, can you design your own visual search experiments to test whether changing the number of distracters affects the search? Will increasing the number of distracters make your search more difficult? You could do this experiment using physical objects or flash cards, or a graphical programming interface like Scratch.

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