Abstract
Attention is known to play an important role in shaping the behaviour of both human and animal foragers. Here, in three experiments, we built on previous interactive tasks to create an online foraging game for studying divided attention in human participants exposed to the (simulated) risk of predation. Participants used a “sheep” icon to collect items from different target categories randomly distributed across the display. Each trial also contained “wolf” objects, whose movement was inspired by classic studies of multiple object tracking. When participants needed to physically avoid the wolves, foraging patterns changed, with an increased tendency to switch between target categories and a decreased ability to prioritise high reward targets, relative to participants who could safely ignore them. However, when the wolves became dangerous by periodically changing form (briefly having big eyes) instead of by approaching the sheep, foraging patterns were unaffected. Spatial disruption caused by the need to rapidly shift position—rather the cost of reallocating attention—therefore appears to influence foraging in this context. These results thus confirm that participants can efficiently alternate between target selection and tracking moving objects, replicating earlier single-target search findings. Future studies may need to increase the perceived risk or potential costs associated with simulated danger, in order to elicit the extended run behaviour predicted by animal models of foraging, but absent in the current data.
Highlights
Traditional visual search—involving a single target and a variable set-size of distractors—has taught us much about the cognitive processes we use to successfully locate items of interest in the world around us (Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Wolfe & Horowitz, 2017)
We have argued that common attentional constraints may account for the similar behavioural patterns seen in animal foraging and human multiple-target search scenarios (Kristjánsson et al, 2014). Continuing this line of foraging research, the current paper addresses another important aspect of search in the real-world: the fact that we rarely have the luxury of being able to focus attention solely on target selection
The reduction in the number of runs when target selection becomes more difficult is more pronounced for the distracted participants than the hunted participants, the opposite of the pattern we had predicted
Summary
Traditional visual search—involving a single target and a variable set-size of distractors—has taught us much about the cognitive processes we use to successfully locate items of interest in the world around us (Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Wolfe & Horowitz, 2017). Extending the classic single-target paradigm, a number of groups have examined search behaviour in tasks where multiple targets must be located on a given trial (see Kristjánsson et al, 2019; Thornton et al, 2020 for recent discussion). Much of this work stems from the observation that real-life activities—such as finding the correct change, Continuing this line of foraging research, the current paper addresses another important aspect of search in the real-world: the fact that we rarely have the luxury of being able to focus attention solely on target selection. Research (2021) 6:35 be played directly online at https://maltacogsci.org/thePredationGame
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