The choices people make in everyday search tasks, such as looking for misplaced keys, are often shaped by a balance between speed and accuracy. But new research suggests that individuals may not significantly alter this balance even when instructed to do so. The findings were published in Psychreg Journal of Psychology.
The study, led by Prince Kouamelan Kouassi, PhD at the American University in Dubai, explored how people adapt their decision-making when told to prioritise speed or accuracy in a controlled foraging task. Participants searched for a hidden acorn in virtual tree patches, completing separate blocks in which they were instructed to respond either as quickly as possible or as accurately as possible.
Kouassi explained the motivation for the research: “This study wanted to understand what really matters when people search for something such as finding your keys at home or spotting a friend in a crowd. Is it about the way you choose to search or is it more about how you balance being quick versus being careful. Past research with both animals and people suggested that the balance between speed and accuracy could be the deciding factor. The researcher used a computer based foraging game and a decision making model to see if changing that balance would change how people performed.”
Despite these clear instructions, analysis revealed little change in behaviour between the two conditions. Participants tended to stick to their own consistent patterns, with no dominant search strategy emerging. The order in which they examined patches varied widely, and no single approach accounted for more than 30% of an individual’s searches.
“Results showed that telling people to be more accurate in one part of the game and quicker in another did not actually change much about how they played. People kept using a variety of search styles and their speed and accuracy stayed pretty much the same across both parts of the task,” Kouassi commented.
Response times and accuracy rates also remained stable across blocks, with statistical tests confirming no significant differences. This stability suggested that participants did not meaningfully shift their speed-accuracy trade-off, the point at which they balance the benefits of taking more time for greater precision against the rewards of acting quickly.
When the results were analysed using the Random Walk Drift Diffusion Model, which can estimate how much evidence a person requires before making a choice, the same pattern emerged. Kouassi noted, “The decision thresholds which represent the point where someone feels ready to choose did not really change between the two parts. This suggests that people either ignored the instructions or just stuck to their own natural way of balancing speed and accuracy. In other words if you want people to change how they make decisions simply telling them to speed up or slow down may not be enough.”
The study builds on theories such as optimal foraging theory and the marginal value theorem, which describe how animals, including humans, decide when to abandon one option in favour of another. In this case, however, the data suggested that human search performance was not strongly driven by deliberate adjustments to the speed-accuracy balance.
Kouassi noted that the experiment’s reliance on verbal instructions may have limited its impact. Without incentives or penalties tied to performance, participants may have had little motivation to alter their natural approach. The small sample size of just six participants also restricted the scope for statistical conclusions.
Looking ahead, Kouassi said, “The next step is to design the game so that differences in speed and accuracy come naturally from the players themselves rather than from instructions. The plan is to use groups of people who already tend to think and act differently when making decisions. One way to do this is by using age differences. Younger adults often focus on speed while older adults tend to be more careful and middle aged adults are usually somewhere in between. By testing all three age groups in the same game it should be easier to spot natural differences in decision making styles and learn more about how people trade off speed and accuracy in everyday situations.”
While the current results do not confirm that people can easily manipulate their speed-accuracy trade-off in visual search tasks, they highlight the consistency of personal decision-making styles and the potential need for more robust methods to shift them in experimental settings.
