Finding Lego Bricks With Our Eyes and Our Hands

Visual search is the act of looking for—and hopefully finding—something that is important or that you need. You probably do this every day, like when you must find your backpack before heading off to school. Sometimes you can find what you are looking for just by using your eyes, but other times also you have to use your hands, like when you are looking for a pencil in a cluttered drawer. This is called “interactive search” because it involves interacting with the search environment by moving things around with your hands. In our study, we investigated how to make people better interactive searchers by asking them to find specific LEGO bricks in trays full of bricks. We found that people are actually better at this task when they direct their attention and actively search for targets, vs. when they use a relaxed search strategy.