one of the leading classes of tasks used in the study of visual attention and perception. In the tasks, the subject must find one target stimulus among the many visual stimuli presented and give an answer as quickly as possible about its presence or absence. There are two main variants of the classic visual search task:1) Search by one feature. A target stimulus differs from distractors in one basic feature – color, size, shape, orientation, etc.2) Search by combination of features. The number of features that distinguish the target stimulus from distractors is more than one (black vertical line among black horizontal lines and white lines).
In the case of a search by one feature, the reaction time, as a rule, does not depend on the number of objects among which the search is carried out (parallel search). For a search by a combination of features, the reaction time increases in proportion to the increase in the number of distractors (“sequential search”).