Abstract
Visual foraging involves the search for multiple targets in each display. There can be more than one target types and they are usually surrounded by distractors. The majority of studies on visual attention are conducted with single target search tasks, which does not adequately capture visual orienting over time. By studying visual attention with a foraging task, it is possible to investigate how target selection is organized throughout a trial. We tested the foraging organization of five age groups, children aged 6, 9, 12, 15, and adults, in foraging tasks where targets were either defined by a single feature (color) or a conjunction of two features (color and shape), using two different target types per task. Four measures were used to assess organizational abilities: intertarget distance, the number of intersections, best-r, and the deviation from the optimal path (percentage above optimal: PAO). We found that foraging organization increased gradually throughout childhood and adolescence, in both the feature and conjunction tasks. At first glance, feature foraging seemed to be more organized than conjunction foraging, but by calculating the best-r and the deviation from the optimal path separately for each target type in the conjunction foraging trials, we found that conjunction foraging is as organized as feature foraging. That indicates that participants treat each conjunction foraging trial as two separate search paths, one for each type of target.