Cue relevance drives early quitting in visual search

Irrelevant salient distractors can trigger early quitting in visual search, causing observers to miss targets they might otherwise find. Here, we asked whether task-relevant salient cues can produce a similar early quitting effect on the subset of trials where those cues fail to highlight the target. We presented participants with a difficult visual search task and used two cueing conditions. In the high-predictive condition, a salient cue in the form of a red circle highlighted the target most of the time a target was present. In the low-predictive condition, the cue was far less accurate and did not reliably predict the target (i.e., the cue was often a false positive). These were contrasted against a control condition in which no cues were presented. In the high-predictive condition, we found clear evidence of early quitting on trials where the cue was a false positive, as evidenced by both increased miss errors and shorter response times on target absent trials. No such effects were observed with low-predictive cues. Together, these results suggest that salient cues which are false positives can trigger early quitting, though perhaps only when the cues have a high-predictive value. These results have implications for real-world searches, such as medical image screening, where salient cues (referred to as computer-aided detection or CAD) may be used to highlight potentially relevant areas of images but are sometimes inaccurate. The present study examines how salient cues that sometimes highlight targets in visual search impact behavior. This is relevant for any type of visual search in which information from an initial reader is conveyed to a second human reader. The first reader may also be human, but in many cases artificial intelligence (AI) is used to make a first pass at identifying targets in a complex image. One example of this is in medical image screening, where computer-aided detection (CAD) signals are used to convey information from AI to a human observer. The negative effects that occur when these types of cues are false positives are not fully understood. In the present study, we find evidence to suggest that on the subset of trials in which cues are false positives, there are significant changes in strategy that cause participants to be more likely to miss targets that are present elsewhere. Moving forward, in any task in which information is conveyed from one searcher (human or not) to a second, human searcher, designers may want to consider alternative ways of highlighting information to avoid these early quitting effects. More research is needed to find out which alternative methods might be most effective.