Emphasizing the importance of the feedback interpretation process in problemistic search literature, we build on the view that underperforming firms seek additional information from its immediate environment to infer its performance outcome. The information available from the organizational task environment assists the focal firm to define the source of the problem and make causal attributions, which directs managerial attention to aspiration or survival levels, thereby influencing firm responsiveness following performance shortfalls. Consequently, we suggest that the task environmental dimension of dynamism weakens, while munificence and complexity strengthen the relationship between performance shortfall and R&D search. We find support for most of our predictions using a sample of 4719 firm-year observations belonging to 988 publicly listed firms from the United States manufacturing industry between 2010-2016. By unraveling the effects of the environment on the process of feedback interpretation, our study shows how information derived from the environment drives firm responsiveness and, in doing so, hopes to contribute to the research on problemistic search.