The Influence of Blocking on Feature Learning and Optimal Decision in the Visual Foraging Task

Foraging refers to behavior that exploits the current environment for resources and induces exploration for a better environment. Visual foraging tasks have been used to study human behavior during visual searches. Participants searched for target stimuli among the distractors and either acquired or lost points when they clicked on a target or distractor. In the current study, we investigated the influence of blocking feature learning in visual foraging. For this purpose, we divided participants into control and blocking groups. The blocking group completed three phases: in the first phase, stimulus colors predicted rewards; in the second phase, stimulus color and orientation predicted rewards; in the third phase, only stimulus orientation predicted rewards. The control group completed either the second and third phases (Experiments 1 and 2) or all three phases (Experiment 3) with different reward combinations: color in Phase 1, color and orientation in Phase 2, and orientation in Phase 3. When the learning of a stimulus feature was blocked, the participants made less accurate responses. This suggests that the learning of task-relevant information was disturbed, and the blocked feature was not selected to after blocking. Additional analyses showed that the performance deviated slightly from the optimal performance; however, the extent of the deviation was not affected by blocking, implying that two distinct decision-making processes were involved in visual foraging. Our findings highlight the impact of blocking feature learning on visual foraging performance and reveal its distinct influence on multiple decision-making processes in this task.