Assessing the generality of strategy optimization across distinct attentional tasks.

Abstract

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.

Selection history and the strategic control of attention.

“…A more robust difference in response time between participant groups may have been suppressed by the fact that participants in the Control group had more practice navigating the more difficult 13/27 displays. The use of the optimal strategy also comes at some cost to time on task that is balanced with its benefits, as the process of evaluating the displays to determine which color is the less abundant one is itself attentionally demanding (Hansen et al, 2019; see also Li et al, 2022), along with the corresponding need to then update attentional priorities before search commences. On the whole, we see robust evidence that prior experience had a powerful influence on how participants chose to approach the visual search task, and more limited evidence that this choice had consequences for the efficiency of task performance.…”

“…Critically, the distribution of red-to-blue nontargets is imbalanced in this task such that there are sometimes more blue nontargets and sometimes there are more red nontargets, with the optimal visual search strategy being to search through the less abundant color until a target of that color is found. In this respect, searching optimally in this task involves parsing the display into two groups of stimuli based on color (Hansen et al, 2019; Li et al, 2022) and restricting search to one of those groups, which is an attentional strategy that can be used in a variety of contexts involving heterogeneous stimulus displays (Arita et al, 2012; Beck & Hollingworth, 2015; Becker et al, 2015). Observers tend to reliably favor the optimal search strategy in the ACVS task, albeit quite modestly (Irons & Leber, 2016, 2018), although optimality may be higher under conditions of high arousal (Kim et al, 2021).…”

Individual Variation in Encoding Strategy Optimization in Visual Working Memory: Evidence From a Change Detection Task

“…Therefore, it remains unclear how individual differences in selective encoding strategy relate to individual differences in a broader range of WM strategies. On the one hand, it may be that strategy optimization is highly task-specific and does not generalize to sufficiently dissimilar task contexts (Clarke et al, 2022;Li et al, 2022). On the other hand, individuals differences in strategy use may in part reflect a general tendency to optimize encoding strategies.…”

Joint contributions of preview and task instructions on visual search strategy selection

“…The inclusion of the line judgment task during the preview period -which disrupted the participants' use of the preview --worsened optimality. Subsequent studies have included previews on the theoretical assumption that they boost optimality (Li et al, 2022;McKinney et al, 2022). Here, we systematically manipulate preview to directly establish the relationship between appraisal time and optimality.…”