Don’t hide the instruction manual: A dynamic trade-off between using internal and external templates during visual search

Abstract

Visual search is typically studied by requiring participants to memorize a template initially, for which they subsequently search in a crowded display. Search in daily life, however, often involves templates that remain accessible externally, and may therefore be (re)attended for just-in-time encoding or to refresh internal template representations. Here, we show that participants indeed use external templates during search when given the chance. This behavior was observed during both simple and complex search, scaled with task difficulty, and was associated with improved performance. Furthermore, we show that participants used external sampling not only to offload memory, but also as a means of verifying whether the template was remembered correctly at the end of trials.We conclude that the external world may not only provide the challenge (e.g., distractors), but may dynamically ease search. These results argue for extensions of state-of-the-art models of search, because external sampling seems to be used frequently, in at least two ways and is actually beneficial for task performance. Our findings support a model of visual working memory that emphasizes a resource-efficient trade-off between storing and (re)attending external information.