Quitting rules in hybrid foraging search: From early childhood to early adulthood

Research on re-searching: interrupted foraging is not disrupted foraging

In classic visual search, observers typically search for the presence of a target in a scene or display. In foraging tasks, there may be multiple targets in the same display (or "patch"). Observers typically search for and collect these target items in one patch until they decide to leave that patch and move to the next one. This is a highly rule-governed behavior. The current study investigated whether these rules are disrupted when the foraging is interrupted in various manners. In Experiment 1, the foraging was briefly interrupted and then resumed in the same patch. In Experiments 2 and 3, the foraging in each patch either ended voluntarily or compulsorily after a fixed amount of time. In these cases, foraging resumed in a patch only after all patches were visited. Overall, the rules of foraging remained largely intact, though Experiment 2 shows that foraging rules can be overridden by the demand characteristics of the task. The results show that participants tended to perform approximately consistently despite interruptions. The results suggest that foraging behavior in a relatively simple foraging environment is resilient and not easily disrupted by interruption.

The time course of visual foraging in the lifespan: Spatial scanning, organization search, and target processing

Visual foraging is a variant of visual search, consisting of searching for an undetermined number of targets among distractors (e.g., looking for various LEGO pieces in a box). Under non-exhaustive tasks, the observer scans the display, picking those targets needed, not necessarily all of them, before leaving the search. To understand how the organization of such natural foraging tasks works, several measures of spatial scanning and organization have been proposed in the exhaustive foraging literature: best-r, intertarget distances, PAO, and target intersections. In the present study, we apply these measures and new Bayesian indexes to determine how the time course of visual foraging is organized in a dynamic non-exhaustive paradigm. In a large sample of observers (279 participants, 4-25 years old), we compare feature and conjunction foraging and explore how factors like set size and time course, not previously tested in exhaustive foraging, might affect search organization in non-exhaustive dynamic tasks. The results replicate previous findings showing younger observers' searching being less organized, feature conditions being more organized than conjunction conditions, and organization leading to a more effective search. Interestingly, observers tend to be less organized as set size increases, and search is less organized within a patch as it advances in time: Search organization decreases when search termination is coming, suggesting organization measures as potential clues to understand quitting rules in search. Our results highlight the importance of studying search organization in foraging as a critical source of understanding complex cognitive processes in visual search.