Exercise IV - Visual Search or " Where's Wally"

Do you remember Where's Wally books? I always had a great time looking for Wally, totally oblivious to the science behind it.
Exercise IV is the most challenging of all. It is a "not so fun and extremely demanding" version of my childhood's colorful books.
According to the PTS manual, this drill requires: "Visual Planning, Perceptual Speed, Figure-Ground Perception, Visual Memory, Ocular Motility, Directionality, and Temporal Visual Processing".
Before I go further, I would like to define Figure-Ground Perception, Visual Planning and Visual Memory.*

Figure-Ground Perception: it is the ability to discriminate between target and background.
A well known example of it is the "white vase and the two black faces". When you choose the white stimuli as target, you see a vase and the black becomes background. When choosing the black as stimuli, you see two faces and the white falls in the background.


Visual Planning: is the strategy chosen for searching a target. Just like you do while sight-reading. You make choices grouping the notes, searching from bottom/up or top/down, horizontally or vertically, etc.

Visual Memory: is a very important skill while sight-reading. Visual memory is the ability to recall images such as faces, words, musical notation, objects, etc.
Professional sight-readers call it "buffers"**. They scan the score ahead and keep the memory of it in order to retrieve it later.

Exercise IV: it requires you to search for a specific target among several columns with objects very similar to the target being searched.

It is a very complex task. When the targets are numbers or letters, it is easy to group them since we have been doing this all our lives. When the target is composed mostly of consonants, it requires more strategy and memory skills. If the target is a combination of symbols such as {]{#%@, it becomes overwhelming and confusing.
I have not arrived at combination of letters, numbers and symbols (I am not sure I want to get there).

Target Type: numbers,
upper case and lower case letters,
symbols,
combination of numbers, letters, and symbols.

Length of Sequence: number characters in the sequence varies from two to six.

Number of Combination: number of different combination to select from varies from 15 to 140.

Goal: less than 3.0 average errors or omissions per trial.

Wish me luck!

I will be updating my progress on all exercises. See the comment section below them.


* Ocular Motility, Directionality and Temporal Visual Processing have already been defined in previous posts (8-23-09, 1-11-10).
** See post 8-23-09 "The effect of skill on the eye-hand span during musical reading"