Filtering distractors is costly

ABSTRACT

To find a target in visual search, it is often necessary to filter out task-irrelevant distractors. People find the process of distractor filtering effortful, exerting physical effort to reduce the number of distractors that need to be filtered on a given search trial. Working memory demands are sufficiently costly that people are sometimes willing to accept aversive heat stimulation in exchange for the ability to avoid performing a working memory task. The present study examines whether filtering distractors in visual search is similarly costly. The findings reveal that individuals are sometimes willing to accept an electric shock in exchange for the ability to skip a single trial of visual search, increasingly so as the demands of distractor filtering increase. This was true even when acceptance of shock resulted in no overall time savings, although acceptance of shock was overall infrequent and influenced by a plurality of factors, including boredom and curiosity. These findings have implications for our understanding of the mental burden of distractor filtering and why people seek to avoid cognitive effort more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Selective attention
• visual search
• distractor filtering
• aversion
• cognitive effort

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions statement

Brian A. Anderson is solely responsible for the contents of this article.

Ethics approval

All study procedures were approved by the Texas A&M University Institutional Review Board and conform to the principles outlined in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its subsequent amendments. Written informed consent was obtained from each participant.

Open practices statement

The experiments reported in this article were not formally preregistered. Raw data are available at https://osf.io/rkdsz/. We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in the study.

Notes

1 The main effect of set size, F(9,261) = 1.98, p = .042, and the interaction between set size and display heterogeneity, F(9,261) = 2.86, p = .003, remain significant with these six participants removed.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by institutional funds made available by Texas A&M University.