Assessing the generality of strategy optimization across distinct attentional tasks

Individuals vary substantially in the degree to which they optimize their performance in attentional tasks. How do such individual markers of attentional strategy relate across different tasks? Previous research has failed to observe significant correlations in strategy optimization between distinct visual search tasks (Clarke et al., 2022), suggesting that strategy optimization is not unitary, or determined by a single trait variable. Here we test whether strategy optimization shows some degree of generality, specifically across tasks with similar attentional components. We employed the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS; Irons & Leber, 2018a), a visual search paradigm designed to directly measure attentional control strategy. In two studies, we had participants complete the ACVS and a modified, but similar, task with one altered attentional component (specifically, the requirement to use feature-based attention and enumeration, respectively). We found positive correlations in strategy optimization between tasks that do vs. do not involve feature-based attention (r = .38, p = .0068) and across tasks that do vs. do not require enumeration (r = .33, p = .018). These results provide novel evidence for generality of strategy optimization, although the strength of the correlations was weaker than the within-task test-retest reliability of strategy measurements. Thus, while some generality exists, strategy optimization appears to be quite heterogeneous.