Good-enough attentional guidance

Theories of attention posit that attentional guidance operates on information held in a target template within memory. The template is often thought to contain veridical target features, akin to a photograph, and to guide attention to objects that match the exact target features. However, recent evidence suggests that attentional guidance is highly flexible and often guided by non-veridical features, a subset of features, or only associated features. We integrate these findings and propose that attentional guidance maximizes search efficiency based on a 'good-enough' principle to rapidly localize candidate target objects. Candidates are then serially interrogated to make target-match decisions using more precise information. We suggest that good-enough guidance optimizes the speed–accuracy–effort trade-offs inherent in each stage of visual search.