In: Psychology
Think of a time when you had to locate someone in a crowd, such as
a participant in a parade, a friend in a packed theater, or a
runner in a marathon. Based on your experience, respond to the
following:
Did you conduct a conjunctive search? If yes, how did the number of
distracters and features affect your search?
I once had to locate one of my friend in a seminar hall which was packed with people, and there were many people in that hall. I had to use conjunctive search, as during this search process i had to identify a target which is surrounded by many distractors. Conjunctive search involves looking at a combination of features to identify the target. So, here i had to search for my friend who has long , black hair and is thin.
As i had to identify her from behind, i had only these three features. So, the distractors were that a lot of other people also had long, black hair and were thin. The other problem was that many people in the crowd had a hood on, so i couldn't know that she was one of them with the hood. In order to narrow down my search, i had to use other features such as the skin tone and the body posture, after searching i noticed that other four five girls also had similar body posture, but only one of them had the distinct skin tone i was searching for. So, finally i found her using conjunctive search.