When Does the Aardvark Move to the Next Anthill? Foraging search with moving targets

Wolfe, J. M. (2013). When is it time to move to the next raspberry bush? Foraging rules in human visual search. Journal of Vision, 13(3), 1–17. • Moving item displays are an effective method for investigating visual foraging • Moving item displays reduce spatial search systamaticity • Searchers ignored the quality of the upcoming trial when deciding when to quit • In Hybrid Foraging, searchers make runs of one target type before switching to to another target type • Anecdotally, these experiments are way more fun than our usual static search experiments! Task: Get a high rate of point accumulation • Two patches of moving dots appear side-by-side • Left patch is the active search display, right patch is a preview of the next trial • Preview was absent on 25% of trials • Initial set size of 48 dots/patch • Dots worth 0–16 points; greener was always better • 36 different patches with different mean greenness • “Next” button advanced the trial, with the preview moving left to the active side Task: Achieve a set point goal to complete the experiment • Four target items: • Display sizes of 60, 80, 100, & 120 • 20–30% inital target prevalance on each trial • Choosing an item removed it from the display, +2 points for Hits, –1 point for FAs • “Next” button advanced the trial