Shira Tkacz-Domb¹, Kelvin S. Oie², Dwight J. Kravitz^1,3, Stephen R. Mitroff¹; ¹The George Washington University, ²DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, ³National Science Foundation

Visual search, looking for targets among distractors, is a critical cognitive skill that underlies many day-to-day tasks (e.g., finding your keys) as well as several vital professions (e.g., radiology, aviation security). Unfortunately, search is vulnerable to age-related performance decline, and it is important to understand why. To gain deeper insight into search behavior and how it changes with age, the current study continuously recorded participants’ cursor trajectories (i.e., how they moved the mouse cursor around the display) during a search task. In an online experiment, participants searched for target Ts among pseudo-L distractors in visual arrays that contained 1, 12, 18, or 24 total items (50% target prevalence). Stimuli were rotated (0, 90, 180, 270º), and target-distractor similarity was manipulated by varying the symmetry of the L distractors through 7 levels (increasing the offset level moved the vertical segment of the L closer to the center of the horizontal segment, making it more similar to a T). The cursor trajectory data were used to calculate dwell time for the target and distractors, and they were then modeled to explore how behavior changed as a function of target-distractor similarity and age. Broadly, dwell times were longer for distractors that were most configurally similar to the target T shape, indicating increased interference with higher similarity. Age-related changes in search behavior emerged across a number of analyses, revealing nuanced interactions between age and search behavior (e.g., increased dwell time under higher search difficulty for older participants). The results highlight the value of tracking cursor trajectories to reveal age-related changes in search processes.

Acknowledgements: This research was funded by US Army Research Laboratory Cooperative Agreements #W911NF-24-2-0188, #W911NF-23-2-0210, & W911NF-25-2-0104