Spatial structure triggers systematic foraging: Segmenting search displays leads to searching by segments
Peter J Goodwin, Filipe Cristino, Duncan Guest, Christina J Howard · 2026
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Description
Goodwin and colleagues show that invisible structure steers how people hunt through a cluttered display, in a 2026 perception study. Across six online experiments, participants foraged for many copies of two target types among distractors, while the screen was visibly divided into segments holding equal numbers of objects. The divisions carried no hint about where targets hid, since targets were spread evenly.
Even so, searchers kept working inside one segment rather than hopping to the next, a systematic style the layout alone induced. That style cost speed but improved memory for where things had been. Stronger visual structure strengthened the effect. The authors warn that display design silently choreographs search behavior, in the lab and in everyday scenes.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Peter J Goodwin, Filipe Cristino, Duncan Guest, Christina J Howard |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 104 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |