Abstract
Visual foraging is a widely used paradigm in attentional and developmental studies. It is a variant of visual search, consisting of searching for an undetermined number of targets among a variable number of distractors. During foraging under non-exhaustive tasks, we do not need to collect every target. The observer scans the display where target and distractors appear at different locations and picks all those targets needed before leaving the current search. To understand how the organization of this foraging search works in humans, several measures of spatial scanning and organization have been proposed in previous works. In the present study, we apply these measures, adding others to understand how the time course of visual foraging works in a dynamic foraging paradigm with free giving up time in a large sample of observers from 4 to 25 years old. We compare two classical conditions, feature and conjunction foraging, and explore how other search variables like set size and search termination rules might affect the organization of the search. The results show significant correlations between age, condition, and set size: Younger observers tend to search in a less organized way, and feature conditions are more organized than conjunction ones, replicating previous results. Unlike typical search tasks, foragers tend to search less organized as set size increases. When splitting every patch into two temporal bins to assess the impact of search termination rules, the results show larger mean inter-trial distances (ITD) and higher percentages above optimal foraging (PAO) for the second half, suggesting a less organized search. However, best-r is greater for the second bin, suggesting that search organization increases when search termination comes, probably helping the observer prepare to move to the following patch. Studying organization is a rich source to understand attentional and decision-making processes in foraging tasks across the lifespan.