Idah Mbithi¹ (), Alexa Warren², Aleena Seyedzadeh³, Melisa Sierra⁴, Jeff Moher⁵; ¹Connecticut College, ²Connecticut College, ³Connecticut College, ⁴Connecticut College, ⁵Connecticut College

The Early Quitting Effect refers to the tendency of individuals to prematurely abandon a visual search task when encountering distractions. When distractors or inaccurate cues cause participants to quit early, miss errors are higher on target present trials, and response times are shorter on target absent trials. In this study, we explored how different cue types influence early quitting. Participants completed a series of visual search trials indicating whether a target “T” was present among nontarget “L’s”. There were three conditions, randomly assigned between participants: a control group with no cues, a group where one letter was highlighted with a circle cue, and a pre-trial cue group where a red fixation cross cue appeared at the location of one letter for 500 milliseconds before search display onset. The cues sometimes highlighted the target, and sometimes a non-target. We first focused on accuracy on trials in which the cue highlighted a non-target, and a target was present elsewhere in the display. The pre-trial fixation cross increased accuracy (56%)compared to the red circle cues (50%), but was still lower than the control condition (66%). This suggests that the pre-trial cue decreases one aspect of the early quitting effect relative to circle cues. However, when the cue highlighted the target, accuracy dropped with the pre-trial cue (72%) compared to the red circle condition (92%). Additionally, response times (RTs) on target absent trials were similar across both cueing conditions. These data suggest that cue types impact visual search and influence the early quitting effect. While the pre-trial fixation cross cue decreased miss rates for inaccurate cues, it also proved to be less effective in guiding attention towards targets. In future studies, we will explore alternative cuing approaches that may effectively guide attention without triggering early quitting when cues are inaccurate.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant BCS-2218384 to JM