The Parallel Guidance of Visual Attention

Shakespeare offers a good, if sanguinary, account of a real-world visual search task: a search for one target item in a field of distractors. Because of processing limitations, candidate targets must be processed in a serial, self-terminating manner. However, not all items in the field are reasonable candidate targets. The serial processing of unfortunate royal surrogates is made more efficient by processes that guide search toward likely kings and away from trees, rocks, sheep, and those soldiers fortunate enough not to be wearing the royal disguise. Research with far less exciting visual search tasks in the laboratory suggests that this guided search is the normal mechanism used by in-