Searching for an O in an array of Cs: eye movements track moment-to-moment processing in visual search

We examined how closely the underlying cognitive processing in a visual search task guides eye movements by comparing two different search tasks. In the extended search task, participants searched for an O in eight clusters of Landolt Cs with varying gap widths (four characters per cluster, arranged to look like words in text). In the single-cluster task, participants searched a single cluster (identical to the ones in the extended search). The key manipulation was gap size; although gap orientation for the distractors varied within a cluster, gap size was constant within a cluster but differed in size from cluster to cluster. The principal findings were that (1) gaze durations in the extended search were almost completely a function of the difficulty of the cluster (i.e., the gap size of the Cs) and (2) the effect of gap size on gaze durations in the extended search was very similar to its effect on response times in the single-cluster search. Thus, it appears that eye movements in the search task are determined almost exclusively by the ongoing cognitive processing on that cluster.