Jeff Moher¹, Caitlin Boyd¹, Alexis Henry¹, Macey Roberts¹, Dasha Zdvizhkova¹; ¹Connecticut College

People often miss targets in visual search, even in relatively simple search tasks. Changes in the design of search interfaces that reduce these miss errors could be valuable, as errors in domains such as medical image reading or x-ray baggage screening carry high costs. In the present study, we manipulated the physical effort required to indicate target presence or absence in a simple visual search task. Prior research has demonstrated that anticipated motor effort can modify higher-level cognitive processes. In this case, we were interested in whether increasing the motor effort required to execute a target absent response would motivate participants to search more thoroughly, and thus reduce miss errors in visual search. Participants searched for a vertical line among tilted lines in a simple display. Targets were present on a randomly selected 50% (high prevalence) or 10% (low prevalence) of trials; prevalence was randomly assigned to participants for each experimental session. Across two blocks of trials, participants completed two distinct versions of the task. In one version they had to reach to the top of the display (more effort) to indicate target absence and the bottom of the display (less effort) to indicate target presence. In the second version, those response mappings were flipped. Eye and hand movements were tracked throughout the experiment. We found that when more effort was required to indicate target absence, miss rates were indeed lowered. This result suggests that a simple manipulation – increasing the effort required to indicate target absence – can modify search strategies and reduce miss errors. Data collection is ongoing, and subsequent analyses will allow us to examine the impact of target prevalence as well as the role of eye movements. These preliminary results highlight the value of integrated approaches to the study of vision and action.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant BCS-2218384 andNational Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke grant R15NS113135 to JM