Abstract
People utilize goal-directed attentional control to selectively and strategically prioritize information in the service of accomplishing a task. Prior studies have focused on factors that modulate the control of attention in a prescribed environment (i.e., instructed goal or strategy and a fixed target feature). However, in the real world, people have to decide what they will search for and what strategy they will use to find it. What are the principles that govern the control of attention in these sorts of situations? We hypothesized that goal-directed attention serves to minimize the exertion of effort in accomplishing task goals. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a pair of experiments in which participants performed a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search task. There were two targets on every trial, one red and the other blue, and participants only needed to find one. We modified the color ratio between red and blue non-targets (attentional effort, three levels for each color) and added a physical effort requirement after every trial by requiring participants to apply force to a hand dynamometer. Reporting a target in one color required more force to progress to the next trial than reporting the other. The minimization of effort would be reflected in searching for the target in the less numerous color and the color associated with less physical effort, balancing these two priorities when the easier-to-find target is also associated with greater physical demand. In Experiment 1, participants were provided no information about the relationship between color and effort, whereas, in Experiment 2, participants were fully informed of these relationships. Across both experiments, we show that physical and attentional effort demands jointly determine how participants choose to conduct a visual search, consistent with the principle of effort minimization in the goal-directed control of attention.