Exaggerated prevalence effect with the explicit prevalence information: The description-experience gap in visual search

Abstract

Despite the increasing focus on target prevalence in visual search research, few papers have thoroughly examined the effect of how target prevalence is communicated. Findings in the judgment and decision-making literature have demonstrated that people behave differently depending on whether probabilistic information is made explicit or learned through experience, hence there is potential for a similar difference when communicating prevalence in visual search. Our current research examined how visual search changes depending on whether the target prevalence information was explicitly given to observers or they learned the prevalence through experience with additional manipulations of target reward and salience. We found that when the target prevalence was low, learning prevalence from experience resulted in more target-present responses and longer search times before quitting compared to when observers were explicitly informed of the target probability. The discrepancy narrowed with increased prevalence and reversed in the high target prevalence condition. Eye-tracking results indicated that search with experience consistently resulted in longer fixation durations, with the largest difference in low-prevalence conditions. Longer search time was primarily due to observers re-visited more items. Our work addressed the importance of exploring influences brought by probability communication in future prevalence visual search studies.