Searching for individual determinants of probabilistic cueing in large-scale immersive virtual environments

Large-scale search behaviour is an everyday occurrence, yet its underlying mechanisms are not commonly examined within experimental psychology. Key to efficient search behaviour is the sensitivity to environmental cues that might guide exploration, such as a target appearing with greater regularity in one region than another. Spatial cueing by probability has been examined in visual search paradigms, but the few studies that have addressed its contribution to large-scale search and foraging present contrasting accounts of the conditions under which a cueing effect can be reliably observed. In the present study, participants physically searched a virtual arena by inspecting identical locations until they found the target. The target was always present, although its location was probabilistically defined so that it appeared in the cued hemispace on 80% of trials. In Experiment 1, when participants’ starting positions were stable, a probabilistic cueing effect was observed, with a strong bias towards searching the cued side. In Experiment 2, the starting position changed across the experiment, such that the cued region was defined in allocentric co-ordinates only. In this case, a probabilistic cueing effect was not observed across the sample. Analysis of individual differences in Experiment 2 suggests, however, that some participants may have learned the contingency underpinning the target’s location, although these differences were unrelated to other tests of visuospatial ability. These results suggest that the ability to learn the likelihood of an item’s fixed location when starting from different perspectives is driven by individual differences in other cognitive or perceptual factors.