Effort expectation and strategic cue use in visual search

Han, Sizhu; Tünnermann, Jan; Hornung, S; Schubö, Anna · 2025 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/s13415-025-01358-1

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Summary

This study investigates the role of effort expectation in the strategic use of negative cues during visual search. While positive cues (signaling target features) consistently facilitate search, the effectiveness of negative cues (signaling distractor features) remains inconsistent. The authors hypothesize that utilizing negative cues incurs mental effort, and their use depends on whether the expected benefit outweighs this cost. Crucially, because actual search effort is only experienced after the search begins, participants must rely on *expected* effort derived from prior experience to decide whether to employ negative cues. The study aims to disentangle expected effort from actual task difficulty to determine if expecting a difficult search boosts the utilization of negative cues. The experiment involved 30 participants performing a visual search task using Gabor patches. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the similarity between target and distractor orientations (easy vs. difficult). To manipulate effort expectation, blocks consisted predominantly of either easy (80%) or difficult (80%) trials, with a minority of trials violating this expectation. Before each trial, participants received a positive cue (target color), a negative cue (distractor color), or a neutral cue. Response times (RTs) were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA and Bayesian multi-level modeling to assess cueing effects (RT differences between neutral and cued trials) across conditions of expected and unexpected difficulty. The results demonstrated that positive cueing benefits increased when search was more effortful, and Bayesian analysis revealed that positive cues provided greater facilitation in easy trials when participants unexpectedly encountered them while expecting difficulty. In contrast, negative cues showed no reliable benefits over neutral cues, regardless of task difficulty or effort expectation. Specifically, expecting a difficult search did not enhance the use of negative cues. Additionally, performance was generally faster when expected effort matched actual task difficulty, with this mismatch cost being more pronounced in difficult trials. The findings suggest that the elusive nature of negative cueing effects is not explained by a simple trade-off between expected search effort and cue implementation effort. Participants did not strategically increase negative cue usage when anticipating high search costs. The study highlights an asymmetry in how effort expectation interacts with positive versus negative cues, implying that the mechanisms governing negative cue utilization may involve different constraints or higher inherent costs than previously assumed. These results challenge the hypothesis that predictable high effort drives negative cue adoption and point to the need for further investigation into the neural and cognitive boundaries of negative cue use.

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• visual search