TY  - JOUR
A1  - Niehorster, Diederick C.
A1  - Cornelissen, Tim
A1  - Holmqvist, Kenneth
A1  - Hooge, Ignace
T1  - Searching with and against each other : spatiotemporal coordination of visual search behavior in collaborative and competitive settings
T2  - Attention, perception, & psychophysics
N2  - Although in real life people frequently perform visual search together, in lab experiments this social dimension is typically left out. Here, we investigate individual, collaborative and competitive visual search with visualization of search partners’ gaze. Participants were instructed to search a grid of Gabor patches while being eye tracked. For collaboration and competition, searchers were shown in real time at which element the paired searcher was looking. To promote collaboration or competition, points were rewarded or deducted for correct or incorrect answers. Early in collaboration trials, searchers rarely fixated the same elements. Reaction times of couples were roughly halved compared with individual search, although error rates did not increase. This indicates searchers formed an efficient collaboration strategy. Overlap, the proportion of dwells that landed on hexagons that the other searcher had already looked at, was lower than expected from simulated overlap of two searchers who are blind to the behavior of their partner. The proportion of overlapping dwells correlated positively with ratings of the quality of collaboration. During competition, overlap increased earlier in time, indicating that competitors divided space less efficiently. Analysis of the entropy of the dwell locations and scan paths revealed that in the competition condition, a less fixed looking pattern was exhibited than in the collaborate and individual search conditions. We conclude that participants can efficiently search together when provided only with information about their partner’s gaze position by dividing up the search space. Competing search exhibited more random gaze patterns, potentially reflecting increased interaction between searchers in this condition.
KW  - Visual search
KW  - Shared gaze
KW  - Collaboration
KW  - Competition
KW  - Eye movements
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50257
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-502574
SN  - 1943-3921
SN  - 1943-393X
N1  - Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
VL  - 81
IS  - 3
SP  - 666
EP  - 683
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York, NY
ER  -