Jan Tünnermann¹, Joy J. Geng², Anna Schubö¹; ¹Philipps University Marburg, ²University of California Davis

Visual foraging tasks offer a dynamic, naturalistic approach to studying selective attention and search strategies. In this study, we investigated how relational guidance—attention driven by the relationship between target and distractor features rather than their exact values—shapes target templates during foraging. Participants foraged for shape-defined targets (octagons) among distractors (hexagons) using stylus clicks on a tablet-PC. Critically, target and distractor colors were drawn from continuous gradients. In two experimental conditions, the distractor gradient connected either to the pink or orange end of the target gradient, while a control condition featured colors from the opposite (bluish) side of the color wheel. Although participants could have relied solely on the constant shape features to guide their search, they incorporated variable color information into their strategy, revealing consistent relational effects: distributions of selected target colors bent systematically away from the distractor color ranges, as demonstrated through Bayesian parameter estimation. This work highlights that searchers include and tune template dimensions, even when the dimension (in this case, color) is not strictly required to find the target. That relational guidance manifests in dynamic selection choices underscores the utility of foraging paradigms in directly visualizing the impact of template adjustments on behavior.