Great expectations: minor differences in initial instructions have a major impact on visual search in the absence of...

Professions such as radiology and aviation security screening that rely on visual search-the act of looking for targets among distractors-often cannot provide operators immediate feedback, which can create situations where performance may be largely driven by the searchers' own expectations. For example, if searchers do not expect relatively hard-to-spot targets to be present in a given search, they may find easy-to-spot targets but systematically quit searching before finding more difficult ones. Without feedback, searchers can create self-fulfilling prophecies where they incorrectly reinforce initial biases (e.g., first assuming and then, perhaps wrongly, concluding hard-to-spot targets are rare). In the current study, two groups of searchers completed an identical visual search task but with just a single difference in their initial task instructions before the experiment started; those in the "high-expectation" condition were told that each trial could have one or two targets present (i.e., correctly implying no target-absent trials) and those in the "low-expectation" condition were told that each trial would have up to two targets (i.e., incorrectly implying there could be target-absent trials). Compared to the high-expectation group, the low-expectation group had a lower hit rate, lower false alarm rate and quit trials more quickly, consistent with a lower quitting threshold (i.e., performing less exhaustive searches) and a potentially higher target-present decision criterion. The expectation effect was present from the start and remained across the experiment-despite exposure to the same true distribution of targets, the groups' performances remained divergent, primarily driven by the different subjective experiences caused by each groups' self-fulfilling prophecies. The effects were limited to the single-targets trials, which provides insights into the mechanisms affected by the initial expectations set by the instructions. In sum, initial expectations can have dramatic influences-searchers who do not expect to find a target, are less likely to find a target as they are more likely to quit searching earlier.