Great Minds Think Alike? Spatial Search Processes Can Be More Idiosyncratic When Guided by More Accurate Information

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Decision-making science
• Computational neuroscience

Background:

• Pre-decisional information sampling strategies exhibit stable individual differences.
• The drivers of idiosyncratic information sampling remain largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the factors influencing individual differences in spatial search strategies.
• To quantify the idiosyncrasy of search trajectories using novel computational methods.

Main Methods:

• A pre-registered online study involving spatial search tasks.
• Application of machine-learning dimension reduction and sequence alignment algorithms.
• Quantification of search trajectory shape and temporal properties for idiosyncrasy.

Main Results:

• Search trajectory idiosyncrasy increases with better information about target location.
• Poorly informed individuals utilize default, bottom-up search routines.
• Individual search patterns are not necessarily indicative of optimal strategies.

Conclusions:

• Informed individuals exhibit more unique information sampling behaviors.
• Task-specific knowledge influences the adoption of search strategies.
• Default search routines may be employed in the absence of specific information.