# Covert-attention shifting superseded: Simple visual search explained by a computational cognitive architecture with early vision limitations, eye movements, and task strategies

## TL;DR

This paper challenges the idea that covert attention shifts explain simple visual search tasks, proposing instead that eye movements and visual limitations can fully account for human performance.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a computational model using visual limitations and task strategies to explain visual search without covert attention.

## Key findings

- Simulations using the EPIC architecture accurately replicate human response times and accuracy in visual search tasks.
- Models incorporating eye movements and visual resolution fit both group and individual participant data effectively.
- Covert attention shifts are not necessary to explain simple visual search performance.

## Abstract

This article concerns simple visual-search tasks that require people to respond “yes” or “no” about whether a specified target object is present in stimulus displays containing relatively small numbers of typically simple objects. The currently most popular cognitive theories regarding human performance in these tasks claim that a person’s response time depends on the number of shifts of covert visual attention required to choose the response. Such theories provide no significant roles for cognitive task strategies, eye movements, and early-vision limitations (e.g., lower visual resolution and increased crowding effects for displayed objects with greater retinal eccentricity). In contrast, the present research used the EPIC computational cognitive architecture to construct precise simulation models that rely on these more basic mechanisms without assuming any role for covert attention. Results from the simulations show that models systematically incorporating early-vision limitations, eye movements, and parsimonious cognitive task strategies may suffice to account precisely for both the speed and accuracy of human performance during simple visual search. These models succeed at fitting not only empirical data aggregated across participants but also data from different subsets of individual participants who had similar visual parameter values and task strategies. Thus, it appears that covert-attention shifting is not necessary to explain simple visual search. Future models of visual search can be made more veridical and complete by avoiding ill-defined concepts of attention and instead further developing theories of visual mechanisms, task strategies, and motor mechanisms to explain empirical phenomena.