Professor Arryn Robbins
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Imagine your partner asked you to find their boots in the closet. If you don’t know what their boots look like, how do you effectively search for them? Since there’s currently snow on the ground, will you be faster (and more efficient) if the boots turn out to be snow boots compared to cowboy boots? In her new publication in the “Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance,” Prof. Arryn Robbins, postdoctoral fellow in the Psychological Science Department, explored these questions.

In collaboration with a researcher at New Mexico State University, Prof. Robbins examined participants’ eye movements as they searched for objects in a variety of visual contexts. She found that not only were people faster to find a pair of snow boots than cowboy boots when they expected to be searching a snowy scene compared to a southwestern scene, but their eyes landed upon the snow boots much sooner than would be expected if participants weren’t using environmental cues to guide their search behaviors. Her results suggest that the search context automatically creates an expectation for the kinds of features that will be relevant to the search process.

The “Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance,” published by the American Psychological Association, is one of the most high-impact journals for cognitive and neuroscientific research on perception and action. Prof. Robbins’s new work is likely to be highly cited by other researchers in the field.

Later this week, undergraduate psychology major and Psychological Science Department fellow, Kory Scherer ’20, will present some of her work from this research program with Prof. Robbins at the 27 annual Object Perception, Attention, and Memory (OPAM) conference in Montréal, Canada.

SPONSORING DEPARTMENT, OFFICE, OR ORGANIZATION:

Psychological Science

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Anthony Barnhart, abarnhart@carthage.edu