EXPRESS: What Drives Object Selection? The Combined Role of Temporal Costs and Effort during Interactive Search

In a prior set of experiments, we examined drivers of attentional selection within interactive search, specifically focusing on the role of effort (Dewis et al., 2025). We concluded that searchers adopted an easy-first strategy, prioritizing selections with easy to process objects. However, we unintentionally overlooked the potential confound of time within these tasks and consequently, our analyses and conclusions. We have addressed this in the current manuscript by carefully controlling for and further exploring the role of time within interactive search. We utilized a novel methodology which involved effortful interactive search for a target T shape attached to the underside of a set of virtual coins across two independent experiments. In Experiment 1, we manipulated effort whilst controlling for the confound of time. In Experiment 2, to obtain a richer understanding of the role of time within effortful interactive search, we manipulated both time and effort simultaneously. We observed a surprising set of results: first, effort appears to be the predominant driving factor of attentional selection across our tasks, and second, time is indeed an aversive attribute to attentional selection, especially so when paired with high effort, i.e., high effort tasks that also take substantial time to complete.