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Abstract People tend to employ suboptimal attention control strategies during visual search. Here we question why people are suboptimal, specifically investigating how knowledge of the optimal strategies and the time available to apply such strategies affect strategy use. We used the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to assess attentional control optimality. We used explicit strategy instructions to manipulate explicit strategy knowledge, and we used display previews to manipulate time to apply the strategies. In the first two experiments, the strategy instructions increased optimality. However, the preview manipulation did not significantly boost optimality for participants who did not receive strategy instruction. Finally, in Experiments 3A and 3B, we jointly manipulated preview and instruction with a larger sample size. Preview and instruction both produced significant main effects; furthermore, they interacted significantly, such that the beneficial effect of instructions emerged with greater preview time. Taken together, these results have important implications for understanding the strategic use of attentional control. Individuals with explicit knowledge of the optimal strategy are more likely to exploit relevant information in their visual environment, but only to the extent that they have the time to do so.
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Developing an Individual Profile of Attentional Control Strategy
What makes one person better at controlling attention than the next person? Attempts to answer this question have largely focused on measuring individuals’ cognitive abilities. However, variation in attentional performance can also be due to differences in strategy. Here, we describe research showing that individuals vary dramatically in how they choose to control attention, with many reliably choosing suboptimal strategies. Optimal strategy choice appears to be unrelated to attentional control ability, general cognitive ability, or even strategy choice on other attention tasks. It does, however, correlate with how effortful individuals find the optimal strategy, which suggests that strategy choice may be driven by subjective, task-specific effort demands. These findings represent initial steps toward fully characterizing an individual profile of attentional control strategies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1632296
- PAR ID:
- 10547034
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Volume:
- 29
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0963-7214
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 364-371
- Size(s):
- p. 364-371
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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