Exaggerated prevalence effect with the explicit prevalence information: The description-experience gap in visual search
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Exaggerated prevalence effect with the explicit prevalence information: The description-experience gap in visual search Hanshu Zhang1
· Joseph W. Houpt1
© The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
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 lowprevalence 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. Keywords Visual search · The description-experience gap · Prevalence effect
Introduction The effects of target prevalence are increasingly studied topics within visual search research (Wolfe et al. 2005, 2007; Schwark et al. 2013, 2012; Peltier & Becker 2016, 2017a, b; Evans et al. 2013; Ishibashi & Kita 2014; Ishibashi et al. 2012; Lau & Huang 2010; Rich et al. 2008; Van Wert et al. 2009). While prevalence effects on visual search have been widely discussed in some scenarios due to the practical importance of understanding search processes when targets are rare, such as medical image evaluation (Kundel 1982; 2000) and luggage screening (Wolfe et al., 2013), there are limited discussions on how target probability is understood and interpreted by observers in the unbalanced search environment. Meanwhile, research in judgment and Hanshu Zhang
[email protected] Joseph W. Houpt [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA
decision-making indicates that people treat information about event probabilities differently depending on how that probability information is communicated (Hertwig et al., 2004; Hertwig & Erev, 2009). To jointly explore the two related research areas, the goal of our current work is to systematically examine how visual search is affected by the way target prevalence information is given to observers, specifically, whether t
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