Our main objective is to study a vital task in everyday life, Visual Search (VS), in typically developing children, adolescents and younger and older adults. We want to better understand search processes in VS in the lifespan. To do so, we have developed a child-friendly video game-task in which children are told to be pirates, looking for different parts of a treasure that has been stolen. We have also used touchable screens to make it easier both for children and older adults, trying to avoid (when possible) mouses or trackpads. We really need to make the task enjoyable for children first, and then also transferable to work with adolescents, younger and older adults. This task also allows us to make different manipulations to understand which factors may affect VS in the lifespan, like working memory processes, individual differences or attentional déficits. In fact, our final goal is to understand typical development to also understand atypical development like in Attentional Deficit with or without Hyperactivity Disorders (AD/HD). We are essentially testing young children (from about 4-5 to 10 years old), pre-adolescents and adolescentes (from 11 to about 17 years old), young adults (from 18 to about 39 years old) middle age adults (from 40 to about 60 years old), and older adults (from 60+). That gives us a big picture upon the development and decline of visual cognition in the lifespan, by means of VS simple tasks. See an example of our pirate treasure VS task bellow...

FORAGING IN THE LIFESPAN

The standard visual search task is fairly limited, specifically for search termination rules. Those limitations can be elucidated using foraging tasks and hybrid foraging tasks. In those tasks, observers must look for several instances of a target (foraging) or several instances of several targets (hybrid foraging). As observers are not aware of the number of targets, it gives us a better understanding about rules guiding decisions under search termination. Also, it expands the heterogeneity of real world visual search tasks, increasing the validity of the conclusions derived from these studies. This task allows us to better understand differences between visual cognitive development and decline, showing that they can be qualitatively different, specially in search termination rules. Like for typical VS tasks, we have developed a child friendly video-game like task that allows us to test ages from 4 years old to older adults over 60s. See bellow an example of these foraging tasks...

INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS

We bet you can see the gorilla in the following foraging task, but we can assure you that not everybody sees the gorilla while focus during a demanding hybrid foraging task. And this can be modulated by age. Inattentional blindness can be a rich paradigm allowing us to better understand cognitive processes immersed in visual search. It can also help us to understand both typical and atypical attentional development, by comparing performance in these tasks between typical developing children and AD/HD children.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN VISUAL SEARCH

Another interest in our lab is to see how individual differences may mediate all these processes in VS in the lifespan. Our studies here are focus on how attentional capacity, IQ-Intelligence, working memory capacity, computer-based skills, or even emotional traits may affect search. From several years working in experimental psychology and neuropsychology, we have seen that individual differences may be crucial to understand underlying visual cognition processes in visual search.

NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL AND MATHEMATICAL MODELING APPROACHES

Like individual differences, neuropsychology and mathematical modeling are nowadays key approaches in the study of visual cognition. Our senior investigators like our PhD students use methods and theoretical perspectives based on that assumption. We use simulation studies to model cognitive processes in visual search, eye-tracking techniques, and soon neuro-imaging techniques like fMRI to understand how a developmental brain works in these visual search tasks.