Why during a search I see treasure everywhere

In July 2026, while being in Agrigento, Sicily, Italy and searching for minerals, this idea came to me from fossil collecting in Maddalusa and Giazza. While searching through the rocks, I became convinced that any streak, any irregular shape of fracture, any rock which had just a little resemblance of an elongated form was an ammonite to me. Of course, all of them were only common rocks. But each of them for just a split second, until being rejected and disregarded as useless, got its right to exist.

This is not a discovery, it is just an observation, which anyone who has tried finding mushrooms, minerals, or even a parking lot can observe. At some point, anything can become anything else you are looking for. Frosty glass becomes a quartz, tiles glitter and for a minute turn into gold, common stone looks as it “should”. The psychological phenomenon that takes place in this case is associated with the lowering of criteria of similarity due to the active search process of mind.

What I think is: It’s not that your eyesight gets better, rather you have fewer standards for acceptance.

Wrong intuition here is that searching will increase your ability to recognize a target. What I believe happens is quite opposite, to be precise – a mixture of both. Your sensory system does not become more sensitive in discriminating between gold and pyrite. What changes is your criterion for accepting an object as a valid target.

This extremely important distinction (sensitivity vs. criterion) is one of the main ideas of the Signal Detection Theory, the theory formulated in the 1950s for radar technology and psychophysics and applied in the following decades to virtually any situation where discriminating true signal from noise was necessary.

I have done some SOTA work (which I really don’t like), but there is even an older example: In the 1940s, Bruner & Postman demonstrated that the mental state influences perception and biases it to interpret ambiguous stimuli in accordance with the present expectations, the idea of perceptual set. It is not simply a pareidolia, that is seeing things in clouds, something we all do instinctively and unconsciously all the time. This is pareidolia influenced by task.

My take on it

Since I am not a cognitive economist (but my girlfriend is, so by hosmosis…), I just have a rough sketch on a napkin about how to think about this – it is certainly not a theory of any sort.

Now, if the problem is that the criterion decreases, then the following needs to be in the equation, rather than this mysterious “perceived value.” Let’s denote c(t) as the criterion of similarity above which an object x becomes a “plausible candidate” for inspection, where t denotes the number of seconds since the beginning of the session. Then: $c(t) = c₀ − I(t) · e^{−λ·d(x,T})$

where:

• c₀ is the “resting” threshold, which I have without any search going on (the stone is a stone and I am not picking it up)
• d(x,T) is the distance between the stimulus x and the target object T which I am looking for (a true ammonite has a d = 0, a regular stone will have a big d)
• I(t) is the intensity of the search state right now, how “in hunting” my brain is
• λ controls how fast the effect drops off away from the target

The more similar the stimulus is to my needs (small d), the more reduction in the threshold is required to get rid of it and to pick up the stone and flip it over to examine it. Such a distance-dependent decay property is based on the idea presented by Shepard (1987), the first scientist to prove that perceptual generalization always obeys such an exponential function.

From intuition, I know that it is not a constant but rather increases as you try searching (much like a slot machine in which intermittent reinforcements make sure that your attention remains high) and then reduces sharply as you stop the search, as you head home, as you turn off the “searching mode”. For instance: $I(t) = α · (1 − e^{−β·t})$ during the search

which rises slowly and after the search process is completed, the fall is very rapid. What goes up is not the rating of the stimulus, but rather the threshold of acceptance on my part; the ammonite doesn’t look any prettier because I’m looking for it, but rather I accept less and less like ones.

Some predictions

Having in mind the proposed mechanism of gradual criterion reduction caused by the search state, one can expect the following conclusions:

1. The closer the match of the stimulus to the target, the higher the likelihood that it passes the threshold and is detected/inspected. Sparkling glass object will be better deceiving an individual than a simple stone. The probability of such detection decreases when one gets away from the prototype of the searched-for object.

2. The higher the need for the search, the lower the detection threshold. An individual that searches quickly (because he/she has little time, there is high stake) will have less and less similarity requirements to the searched-for object in comparison to an individual searching slowly.

3. Threshold falls gradually with time and grows quickly when the search stops. The more one is searching without results, the lower the criterion (the principle of intermittent reinforcement that makes gamblers play on slot-machines). But, as soon as one stops his/her search and comes out of the search state of mind, the criterion should grow rapidly.

Thirdly and by far, the most exciting prediction is the one where neither the traditional explanation of pareidolia, nor of category priming will predict the same exact curve, a steady drop of the threshold until the end of the experiment, followed by an instant increase of the threshold right at the end of the experiment.

The idea is neither mine nor something new. The Signal Detection Theory has existed for seventy years, while according to Bruner & Postman, the Perceptual Set has existed for eighty years. I did not come up with anything that was not said before and all these formulas are just me making sense of things.

What I have learned from Maddalusa and Giazza is that psychologists knew for long that searching for something makes you attentive and makes you prone to deception. It is a widely known fact for any amateur paleontologist, mycologist, or minerologist.