Abstract：
People often choose suboptimal attentional control strategies during visual search. This has been at least partially attributed to the avoidance of the cognitive effort associated with the optimal strategy, but aspects of the task triggering such avoidance remain unclear. Here, we attempted to measure effort avoidance of an isolated task component to assess whether this component might drive suboptimal behavior. We adopted a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to measure people\'s visual search strategies. To perform optimally, participants must make a numerosity judgment-estimating and comparing two color sets-before they can advantageously search through the less numerous of the two. If participants skip the numerosity judgment step, they can still perform accurately, albeit substantially more slowly. To study whether effort associated with performing the optional numerosity judgment could be an obstacle to optimal performance, we created a variant of the demand selection task to quantify the avoidance of numerosity judgment effort. Results revealed a robust avoidance of the numerosity judgment, offering a potential explanation for why individuals choose suboptimal strategies in the ACVS task. Nevertheless, we did not find a significant relationship between individual numerosity judgment avoidance and ACVS optimality, and we discussed potential reasons for this lack of an observed relationship. Altogether, our results showed that the effort avoidance for specific subcomponents of a visual search task can be probed and linked to overall strategy choices.
摘要：
在视觉搜索过程中，人们经常选择次优的注意力控制策略。这至少部分归因于避免与最佳策略相关的认知努力，但触发这种避免的任务的方面仍不清楚。这里,我们试图测量一个孤立的任务组件的努力避免，以评估该组件是否可能驱动次优行为。我们采用了自适应选择视觉搜索(ACVS)的修改版本，一项旨在衡量人们视觉搜索策略的任务。为了以最佳方式执行，参与者必须做出数字判断-估计和比较两个颜色集-然后才能有利地搜索两个数量较少的颜色集。如果参与者跳过数量判断步骤，他们仍然可以准确地执行，尽管速度要慢得多。为了研究与执行可选的数字判断相关的努力是否可能是最佳性能的障碍，我们创建了需求选择任务的变体，以量化避免数量判断努力。结果表明，可靠地避免了数字判断，为个人在ACVS任务中选择次优策略提供了潜在的解释。然而，我们没有发现个体数量判断回避与ACVS最优性之间存在显著关系，我们讨论了这种缺乏观察关系的潜在原因。总之,我们的结果表明,视觉搜索任务的特定子组件的努力回避可以被探测,并与整体策略选择相关联.
