Tianyu Zhang¹, Andrew B. Leber¹; ¹The Ohio State University

In daily life, people often engage in visual search, such as finding a car in a parking lot or a friend in a crowded mall. While search is characterized by low-demand, or even automatic, processes and may not be considered as effortful as working memory (Anderson, 2018), recent studies have shown that search is more effortful than previously thought, with individuals even willing to exert physical effort to reduce search demand (Anderson & Lee, 2023). However, it remains unclear how specific components of search contribute to perceived effort. For example, both set size and target-nontarget similarity can affect performance (Duncan & Humphreys, 1989). But do these factors affect the subjective experience of effort similarly? We investigate these questions using a modified effort discounting paradigm. During the selection phase, participants are offered two T among L search tasks that differ in target-nontarget similarity, and they choose freely which task to perform. Across multiple selections, the set size of the selected tasks were adaptively adjusted to reach a choice indifference point between the two. We quantified participants’ preference between easy and difficult conditions by the ultimate difference in set size. A small difference means a preference for searching fewer items, while a large difference means a preference for searching less difficult displays (i.e., lower target-nontarget similarity). Results showed participants reached an indifference point when the easy set size exceeded the hard set size by approximately 20 items, despite performance remaining significantly faster in the easy condition. Thus, the choice reflects a relative discounting of search difficulty and preference for smaller set sizes. These findings show that not all components of visual search are equivalent in their subjective demands, and people’s approach to search is not solely to minimize time spent on tasks.