Abstract
The efficiency of how people search for an item in visual search has, traditionally, been thought to depend on bottom-up or top-down guidance cues. However, recent research has shown that the rate at which people visually search through a display is also affected by cognitive strategies. In this study, we investigated the role of choice in visual search, by asking whether giving people a choice alters both preference for a cognitively neutral task and search behavior. Two visual search conditions were examined: one in which participants were given a choice of visual search task (the choice condition), and one in which participants did not have a choice (the no-choice condition). The results showed that the participants in the choice condition rated the task as both more enjoyable and likeable than did the participants in the no-choice condition. However, despite their preferences, actual search performance was slower and less efficient in the choice condition than in the no-choice condition (Exp. 1). Experiment 2 showed that the difference in search performance between the choice and no-choice conditions disappeared when central executive processes became occupied with a task-switching task. These data concur with a choice-impaired hypothesis of search, in which having a choice leads to more motivated, active search involving executive processes.
Highlights
The efficiency of how people search for an item in visual search has, traditionally, been thought to depend on bottom-up or top-down guidance cues
Search efficiency is determined by the reaction times (RTs) × Set Size function, which measures how RTs increase with the number of items, to give the search slope (Treisman & Gelade, 1980)
Even though the stimuli were the same in both conditions, the results showed that search slopes in the passive condition were more efficient than those in the active condition
Summary
Participants completed either the choice or the no-choice condition (with equal numbers of participants assigned to the two conditions). In Experiment 2, on half of the trials all stimuli were red, and on the other half all stimuli were green. Participants were asked to choose which experimental block they would like to complete. Their choice options were that they could complete either BCondition A,^ BCondition B,^ or BCondition C.^ No other information about the blocks was given to participants. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate how much they enjoyed the task, how much they liked the task, and how difficult they found the task. Responses were collected using three Likert scale questions ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much)
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