Human-Like Attention? A Psychophysical Comparison of Visual Search in Humans and MLLMs

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.05463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual search is a fundamental cognitive ability. This study investigates whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit human-like difficulty signatures in visual search tasks. We compared search performance of humans (n = 1,250) and MLLMs using identical 2D and 3D stimuli across different set sizes. Both groups showed efficient performance in feature searches, most clearly when the target had a unique color, but performance degradatio