The effect of background familiarity in visual search: An analysis of underlying factors

The speed and accuracy of visual target search are strongly dependent on the familiarity of the background through which the search proceeds. Search through unfamiliar elements is much more difficult than search through familiar ones. This effect of background familiarity is examined in a series of three experiments. Experiment 1 suggests that the effect is not attributable to an inherently slow classification of individually unfamiliar nontargets. Experiments 2 and 3 investigate three aspects of multicharacter processing potentially sensitive to background familiarity. The results suggest that the background familiarity effect is most parsimoniously viewed as the result of slow or inaccurate segmentation of features extracted from adjacent characters. Mechanisms linking the familiarity of the background with the efficiency of character segregation are discussed in closing.