Nusrat (Progga) Jahan¹, Brian Anderson², Darrell Worthy², Peter Kvam¹, Andrew Leber; ¹The Ohio State University, ²Texas A&M University

In our fast-paced world, visual search is often constrained by tradeoffs. For example, when rushing through a supermarket with a long shopping list, we may forgo our preferred brand when it is harder to find than a satisfactory alternative. The present study asks how people discount their reward preferences as a function of task demands during visual search. Participants (N = 60) first completed a Binary Choice Task where they established their preference among three color-coded options: a stable option (+60 points), a risky and variable option (+20/+60/+100 points; equiprobable), and a control option (0 points). Then they completed an Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS) task where the same colors and rewards appeared, and participants freely chose which color target to search for, though one was sometimes easier to find than the other. We model behavior using a combination of expected utility and delay/effort discounting approaches to assess how reward history shapes attention and tradeoffs under uncertainty. Preference for consistent vs. variable reward schedules varied across participants, and participants were explicitly aware of these preferences. These stable preferences generalized across the two tasks such that stronger initial preferences predicted a bias toward reporting similarly colored ACVS targets, even when searching for the preferred color would be less efficient. At the same time, participants appropriately adapted to differences in search difficulty, and this effort sensitivity was statistically independent of reward-schedule preference. These findings demonstrate that reward history and risk preferences jointly influence attentional strategies, such that individuals bias their search strategies in trial-by-trial decisions. We are currently running a second experiment with equivalent losses to understand how framing modulates these choices and visual search strategies.