Flexibility of processing strategy choices in self-structured environments

In everyday life, people are challenged to manage a variety of tasks and stimuli. Previous research has primarily focused on examining this behavior in externally structured situations in which participants are forced to use a predefined processing strategy. However, everyday life mostly requires people to apply self-generated processing strategies and to choose self-dependently between different processing procedures. The current study examined the factors that influence the strategy choice in two pre-registered experiments and determined which consequences result from forcing people to apply a prescribed strategy. For this purpose, we used a self-structured paradigm where participants were confronted with a complex task environment containing a multitude of targets and in which three different tasks had to be handled. Participants were instructed to complete all tasks but we aimed to address how they approached the paradigm processing when they were allowed to adopt a self-generated strategy compared to a predefined strategy. Our results show that participants exhibit different processing strategies in a self-structured environment. The choice of a strategy can be influenced by individual preferences as well as by prior instruction. Forcing participants to apply a non-preferred strategy, as it regularly happens in externally structured paradigms, resulted in performance decline and increased experience of difficulty.