Influence of Time Pressure on Successive Visual Searches

In the current eye-tracking experiment, we explored the effects of time pressure on visual search performance and oculomotor behavior. Participants performed two consecutive time-pressured searches for a T-shaped target among L-shaped distractors in two separate displays of fifteen items, with the option to self-interrupt the first search (Search 1) to proceed to the second (Search 2). Our results showed that participants maintained high search accuracy during Search 1 across all conditions, but performance noticeably declined during Search 2 with increasing time pressure. Time pressure also led to decreased numbers of fixations and faster response times overall. When both targets where acquired, fixation durations were longer in Search 2 than in Search 1, while saccade amplitudes were shorter in Search 2. Our findings suggest that time pressure leads to the first target being prioritized when targets possess equal value, emphasizing the challenges of optimizing performance in time-sensitive tasks.