Searching for something, whether it is your keys or a familiar face, is a frequent everyday activity. Under some circumstances, such as in security settings, it even carries life-saving implications. Until now, it was widely believed that in order to find what they are looking for, people need to know at least some aspects of what they are trying to find. However, this assumption is inconsistent with common human experiences, such as suddenly finding a friend in a crowd although there was no prior expectation of seeing them.

PhD candidate Oryah Lancry-Dayan and Prof. Yoni Pertzov (in collaboration with Prof. Matthias Gamer of University of Würzburg), demonstrate that despite the many people that each person knows, we can all find a familiar face embedded in unfamiliar ones, even without knowing the identity of that face in advance. This calls for a modification of current theories and makes clear that the cognitive system can utilize information from a large area of the visual environment to guide search, even if it is unclear what the search target looks like.

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