Abstract
Attentional control strategy accounts for significant variation in individual visual search performance. Research has shown that an individual’s strategy optimality is stable within visual search and foraging tasks (Clarke et al., 2020) and generalizes across similar visual search tasks (Li et al., 2021). However, in some paradigms designed to investigate strategy, stimulus salience—rather than individuals’ drive to optimize performance—might explain behavior. Here, we pitted stimulus salience vs. strategy optimization via a modification of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS; Irons & Leber, 2018) paradigm. In Experiment 1, Control Group participants could choose to search for either a red or blue target containing a “5”—each of which was present on every trial. Participants moved the mouse to search, revealing digits by hovering over each object, one at a time. One color subset was always less numerous than the other; as a result, it was more optimal to search for the target in the smaller subset (although note that the smaller subset items were also more salient). In the Manipulated Group, we presented targets sooner in the large subset than in the small subset, such that searching the large (and less salient) subset was now the optimal strategy. Experiment 2 contained a similar task with subsets defined by their spatial location instead of colors. In both experiments, participants’ tendency of choosing the small subset was significantly reduced in the Manipulated Group, in which the target appeared sooner in larger subsets. These results demonstrate that strategy optimization overrides stimulus salience in visual search, and strategy is dependent more on internal, rather than external, factors.