Abstract
Our goal-directed attentional control abilities enable us to flexibly maximize how efficiently we search the visual environment. However, a growing body of research reveals that we often fail to use these abilities. Here, we question how motivational incentives might be used to improve attentional control strategies. Using the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (Irons & Leber, 2018), a task designed to measure attentional strategy use, we manipulated motivation in two ways. In Experiment 1, we limited the exposure of the visual search items, and in Experiment 2, we provided a greater monetary reward for faster search performance. In both experiments, we reasoned that participants would choose the search strategies that enabled faster target identification times; faster search would reduce errors in Experiment 1 and increase earnings in Experiment 2. Results showed that the time-pressure manipulation failed to induce more optimal strategy choices, while the performance-contingent reward manipulation did induce a modest improvement in strategy. Overall, we find some evidence of a link between motivation and strategy optimization, although methods to elicit a more robust boost in optimization remain elusive. Further work is needed in this understudied but vital domain of research.