Austin Durgin¹ (adurgin@conncoll.edu), Maddie McDaniel¹, Jeff Moher¹; ¹Connecticut College

Even in simple visual search tasks, participants miss easily seen targets at a surprisingly high rate. In real-world situations, such as medical image reading or x-ray baggage screening, these errors can carry high costs. One factor that may influence miss rates is when and how participants decide to quit their search. In other words, if I have been searching for a target for a while and don’t see one, when is it time to quit and move on? One factor that we believe may be leveraged to influence quitting strategies in search is effort. People avoid effort where possible, and anticipated effort has been shown to shift decision strategies in other cognitive domains. To examine this issue, we presented participants with a simple visual search task in which they determined whether a vertical target line was present among tilted lines. We varied the amount of effort required to indicate target absence across two conditions. In the “Absent Effort” condition, participants had to hit three different keys to indicate target absence and only one key to indicate target presence. In the “Present Effort” condition, these mappings were reversed such that three keypresses were required to indicate target presence. Participants completed both conditions in randomly counterbalanced order. In the Absent Effort condition, participants committed fewer miss errors, while also taking longer to respond on target absent trials. Together, these results suggest that participants were delaying quitting the search process when a target absent response required the additional effort of three keypresses. This result highlights important links between action and cognition, and also suggests a relatively simple but effective way in which search strategies might be manipulated in real-world search scenarios. Ongoing research in our lab is continuing to explore the role that anticipated effort can play in quitting during visual search.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant BCS-2218384 to JM