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

Everyday human behaviour 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 emphasising 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 organised in patches, with search arrays presented across multiple tables. In single feature search, targets were hidden beneath containers of a particular colour, and in conjunction search, they were beneath containers of a particular colour 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 generalise 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 organisation (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.