'Cognitive strategy' in visual search: how it works and when it generalises

Recent evidence suggests that participants perform better on some visual search tasks when they are instructed to search the display passively (i.e. letting the unique item “pop” into mind) rather than actively (Smilek, Enns, Eastwood, & Merikle, 2006; Watson, Brennan, Kingstone, & Enns, 2010). We extended these findings using eye tracking, a neutral baseline condition (Experiment 1) and testing visual search over a wider range of eccentricies (10 ◦ –30 ◦ , Experiment 2). We show that the passive instructions led to participants delaying their initial saccade compared to participants given active or neutral instructions. Despite taking longer to start searching the display, passive participants then find and respond to the target faster. We show that this benefit does not extend to search where items were distributed in the true periphery.