Optimal cue selection strategy

Abstract Survival in the natural world demands,the selection of relevant visual cues to rapidly and reliably guide attention towards prey an d predators in cluttered environments. We investigate whether our visual system selects cues that guide search in an optimal manner. We formally obtain the optimal cue selection strategy by maximizing,the signal to noise ratio (SNR) between,a search target and surrounding distractors. This optimal strategy successfully accounts for several phenomena in visual search behavior, including the effect of target-distracto r discriminability, uncertainty in target’s features, distractor heterogenei ty, and linear separability. Furthermore, the theory generates a new predict ion, which we verify through psychophysical experiments with human,subjects. Our results provide direct experimental evidence that humans,select visual cues so as to maximize,SNR between the targets and surrounding clutter.