Investigating Individual Differences in Patch Leaving Strategy for Visual Foraging Tasks
Loading...
Date
2023-05
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
When a person is trying to pick strawberries within various bushes, when is a good time for them to leave one bush and go to another in order to maximize their harvest? Such a decision is referred to as patch leaving in which the decision to move from one search area to the next is critical for efficient performance. In this thesis, we explored individual differences in patch leaving strategy and the extent to which this behavior correlates with an optimal point of leaving. In the first experiment, we asked participants to search for T-shaped targets among L-shaped distractors. Participants completed enforced completion blocks, where they needed to exhaustively find all 10 targets before proceeding to a new display, and free choice blocks, where they were able to stop searching on the current display and proceed to the next display at any point in time. The results showed a wide variability in the proportion of targets found before leaving in the free choice blocks despite there being a clear optimal range to leave that would minimize the average time spent on finding one target. This leads us to conclude that the patch leaving strategy in human visual foraging has wide individual differences and often people perform close to suboptimal. Experiment 2 attempted to improve on the limitations of the first study and participants were asked to search for pseudo L-shaped targets now among T-shaped distractors. On the individual level, a positive correlation was discovered between patch leaving behavior from the free choice blocks and the optimal leaving point calculated from the enforced blocks. These results lead us to observe a tendency towards optimality which differs from some of the past research in patch leaving behavior. Taken together, this study, along with previous studies, provides information to contribute to the larger goal of creating a quantified model of individual differences in optimal leaving time strategies.
Description
Keywords
visual search, attentional control, strategy, individual difference