Saachi Kuthe¹, Tianyu Zhang², Andrew Leber³; ¹The Ohio State University

As humans, we frequently use visual search, but the strategies people use to engage in search tend to be inefficient. Why would people choose suboptimal strategies? Previous research has suggested that people avoid effort related to specific cognitive processes required to implement the optimal strategy. However, evidence for such effort avoidance has only been demonstrated across groups of participants, and we have yet to find a task that is sensitive enough to link individuals’ effort avoidance to their strategy choices (see Zhang & Leber, 2024). To better quantify individuals’ effort avoidance, we designed a new paradigm, the Voluntary Engagement Task, which provides participants the option of completing a trial of a task or doing nothing at all. We expected this new paradigm could reveal subtle individual differences across varying demand conditions by measuring the number of trials completed in a fixed period. In this study, we used the Adaptive Choice Visual Search task (ACVS; Irons & Leber, 2016) to measure individuals’ search strategies. In addition, we created two modified conditions. The first required a numerosity judgment, the assumed key component required by the optimal strategy in ACVS, to find the target. The second, a control condition, did not include a numerosity judgment. We calculated the difference in voluntarily completed trials between the numerosity and control conditions to assess the degree to which participants selectively avoided performing the numerosity judgment. Results showed that this avoidance metric was significantly correlated with optimality in the ACVS task, indicating that the more participants avoided the numerosity judgment, the less optimal their search strategies were. Overall, this study demonstrates how individuals’ effort avoidance of specific cognitive components predicts their search behaviors and furthers our understanding of the important role of cognitive effort in driving individuals’ choice of attentional strategies.