Visually guided foraging in virtual worlds: Domain-general properties of search behavior

Everyday human behavior involves economically driven search for visually relevant targets in complex three-dimensional environments. However, psychological research has typically examined visual search and foraging mechanisms separately, with insights into search emphasizing attentional efficiency and accounts of foraging highlighting decision making and cognitive control. In order to more closely examine the interrelation between these processes in fully motile environmental search, we devised a novel virtual reality paradigm that required participants to physically explore a large-scale 3D environment and collect multiple visually defined targets. The search environment was organized in patches, with search arrays presented across multiple tables. In single-feature search, targets were hidden beneath containers of a particular color, and in conjunction search, they were beneath containers of a particular color and shape. Across five experiments, results showed that participants gathered more targets when search was guided by a single feature, irrespective of explicit instruction, suggesting that core distinctions between single-feature and conjunction search generalize to large-scale exploratory search requiring full-body movements. In contrast, foraging decisions appeared to be more context-dependent and were shaped by both environmental constraints and available guidance cues. Analyses of individual difference revealed that executive function supported more structured search organization (e.g., exploration-exploitation trade-off), particularly when target representations were self-generated rather than externally provided, and spatial working memory maintained predefined search templates. These experiments further bridge the gap between visual search and foraging theories, offering a new framework for studying search in dynamic, real-world settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).