In this Project we have implemented behavioral task of visual search in psychtoolbox-3 which can be used for human and animal neuroscience experiments for studying value and memory
For most animals, survival depends on rapid detection of rewarding objects, but search for an object surrounded by many others is known to be difficult and time consuming. However, there is neuronal evidence for robust and rapid differentiation of objects based on their reward history in primates (Hikosaka et al., 2014).We hypothesized that such robust coding should support efficient search for high-value objects, similar to a pop-out mechanism. To test this hypothesis, we let subjects view a large number of complex objects with consistently biased rewards with variable training durations (1, 5, or 30 days). Following training, subjects searched for a high-value object (Good) among a variable number of low-value objects (Bad) (Ghazizadeh et al., 2016).