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Individuals vary substantially in the degree to which they optimize their performance in attentional tasks. How do such individual markers of attentional strategy relate across different tasks? Previous research has failed to observe significant correlations in strategy optimization between distinct visual search tasks (Clarke et al., 2022); suggesting that strategy optimization is not unitary, or determined by a single trait variable.Here we test whether strategy optimization shows some degree of generality, specifically across tasks with similar attentional components. We employed the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS; Irons & Leber, 2018a), a visual search paradigm designed to directly measure attentional control strategy. In 2 studies, we had participants complete the ACVS and a modified, but similar, task with 1 altered attentional component (specifically, the requirement to use feature-based attention and enumeration, respectively). We found positive correlations in strategy optimization between tasks that do versus do not involve feature-based attention (r = .38, p = .0068) and across tasks that do versus do not require enumeration (r = .33, p = .018). These results provide novel evidence for generality of strategy optimization, although the strength of the correlations was weaker than the within-task test-retest reliability of strategy measurements. Thus, while some generality exists, strategy optimization appears to be quite heterogeneous. Public Significance StatementPeople carry out visual search for objects of interest every day, and attentional strategy-how one voluntarily chooses to search-plays a key role in this essential human activity. Researchers have attempted to understand what drives some individuals to use more optimal strategies than others, but this pursuit has been complicated by a recent finding that the degree to which people chose optimal strategies in one task did not predict how optimal they were at other tasks. The present study investigated whether people's tendencies to optimize performance can be similar across multiple tasks, provided that the tasks themselves are similar to one another. Results showed that people did indeed optimize to similar degrees across tasks that were similar to one another, but only weakly so. These results carry clear implications for research seeking to characterize how individuals use attentional strategy; specifically, strategy is unlikely to be explained by a unitary trait variable but rather a heterogeneous set of multiple variables. These variables remain unknown, and further work to identify and describe them is essential.

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