Introduction
In everyday life, animals spend much of their time with looking for something. They need food, nest-building material, or mates and compete with conspecifics for all these pivotal resources. Unfortunately, their location is mostly uncertain, and they are typically embedded within an environment full of irrelevant stimuli (distractors) competing for attention and hindering identification of the actual search item. Many animals actively try to impede their detection as prey or predator by camouflaging and hence, blending into the surrounding. Thus, an individual requires efficient strategies to search in the visual field, which facilitate quick detection of significant objects. The difficulty of visual searchdepends on factors like scene complexity, number of distractors, and similarity between search objects, distractors, and background. This is a computationally demanding task. Since neuronal resources are limited, visual systems cannot process all incoming information...
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Manns, M. (2018). Visual Search. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1514-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1514-1
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