The development of foraging organization

In foraging tasks multiple targets must be found within a single display. The targets can be of one or more types, typically surrounded by numerous distractors. Visual attention has traditionally been studied with single target search tasks but adding more targets to the search display results in several additional measures of interest, such as how attention is oriented to different features and locations over time. We measured foraging among five age groups: Children in grades 1, 4, 7, and 10, as well as adults, using both simple feature foraging tasks and more challenging conjunction foraging tasks, with two target types per task. We assessed participants’ foraging organization, or systematicity when selecting all the targets within the foraging display, on four measures: Intertarget distance, number of intersections, best-r, and the percentage above optimal path length (PAO). We found that foraging organization increases with age, in both simple feature-based foraging and more complex foraging for targets defined by feature conjunctions, and that feature foraging was more organized than conjunction foraging. Separate analyses for different target types indicated that children’s, and to some extent adults’, conjunction foraging consisted of two relatively organized foraging paths through the display where one target type is exhaustively selected before the other target type is selected. Lastly, we found that the development of foraging organization is closely related to the development of other foraging measures. Our results suggest that measuring foraging organization is a promising avenue for further research into the development of visual orienting.