The misrepresentation of spatial uncertainty in visual search: Single- versus joint-distribution probability cues

Investigating an effort avoidance account of attentional strategy choice

People often choose suboptimal attentional control strategies during visual search. This has been at least partially attributed to the avoidance of the cognitive effort associated with the optimal strategy, but aspects of the task triggering such avoidance remain unclear. Here, we attempted to measure effort avoidance of an isolated task component to assess whether this component might drive suboptimal behavior. We adopted a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to measure people's visual search strategies. To perform optimally, participants must make a numerosity judgment-estimating and comparing two color sets-before they can advantageously search through the less numerous of the two. If participants skip the numerosity judgment step, they can still perform accurately, albeit substantially more slowly. To study whether effort associated with performing the optional numerosity judgment could be an obstacle to optimal performance, we created a variant of the demand selection task to quantify the avoidance of numerosity judgment effort. Results revealed a robust avoidance of the numerosity judgment, offering a potential explanation for why individuals choose suboptimal strategies in the ACVS task. Nevertheless, we did not find a significant relationship between individual numerosity judgment avoidance and ACVS optimality, and we discussed potential reasons for this lack of an observed relationship. Altogether, our results showed that the effort avoidance for specific subcomponents of a visual search task can be probed and linked to overall strategy choices.

Attention shifts in the spatial cueing paradigm reflect direct influences of experience and not top-down goals

The spatial cueing effect (SCE) that is elicited by informative spatial cues serves as an empirical marker of attention shifts in the spatial cueing paradigm, and it has been widely interpreted to reflect a relatively pure form of top-down attention control. Contrary to this interpretation, the present study examined the extent to which the magnitude of the SCE could be due to learned associations between specific cues and shifts of attention to the corresponding location, while attempting to track potential changes in participants' task goals across the experiment. This was accomplished by using a novel two-choice, spatial cueing paradigm in which participants chose between two spatial validity contexts. One spatial validity context always involved a 25%-valid (uninformative) arrow cue - called the "test" context; whereas the alternate context - called the "inducing" context - was varied between groups. In particular, associations between specific cues and shifts of attention to the corresponding cued location were perfectly predictable in the "strong inducing" context (100%-valid arrow cues) and imperfectly predictable in the "weak inducing" context (70%-valid arrow cues). Consistent with the experience-dependent account, the results showed that the magnitude of the SCE observed in the test context increased as an individual's experience with the strong inducing context increased. Furthermore, these context effects were observed using both overlearned (arrow) and arbitrary (number) cues, as well as when eye movements were controlled. Altogether, these findings suggest that the magnitude of the SCE can be influenced directly by experience, and not by the top-down goals of the individual.