Autonomy Moderates Individuals’ Expectancy Search Based On Long-term Associative Learning

In daily life,we need to constantly search targets through visual to meet our needs.In this process,the individual will search the target with the expectation,but the choice of the search target is not completely determined by the individual.In different situations,there is a complex attention processing mechanism in the process of target searching.In this study,the moderating role of autonomy in expectation search and the boundary conditions related to the moderating role are studied.Previous studies tend to focus on the influence of the probability when stimuli is occurring on search in the short term,but rarely exploring the expectation of stimuli that individuals have learned in the long term in daily life.Moreover,the search targets in these studies are often completely decided by the researchers,and the subjects cannot choose the target to search according to their own wishes.Three experiments were included in this study.Experiment 1 uses two types of product packaging with color consistency and color inconsistency to manipulate whether individuals’expectations of flavor words were consistent.Free and forced choice tasks are used to manipulate individuals’ perceived autonomy,and the reverse efficiency score of product search was used as the dependent variable to explore the moderating effect of autonomy on search with the expectation.The results support the effectiveness of manipulation on autonomy although no moderating effect is found.In experiment 2,on the basis of experiment 1,virtual reality technology is adopted to further explore the moderating effect of autonomy on individuals’ search with expectation based on long-term association learning.The results support the moderating effect of autonomy when individuals complete the product search task under the condition of color consistency and color inconsistency.On the basis of experiment 2,Experiment 3 further explored the boundary of autonomy by changing the relationship between the options in free-choice and forced-choice and the search target in the subsequent task from task-related to task-independent.The results show that only under the condition of task-related,autonomy can play a moderating role on the search with expectation based on long-term association learning.To sum up,the findings of this study are as follows:1.In the behavioral task paradigm,choice autonomy has no significant effect on the processing of long-term association-based expectation guided product attention.2.Under the virtual reality supermarket search paradigm,free choice will promote the attention processing of individual guided products based on the expectation of long-term connection.3.Under task-independent conditions,the autonomy of choice cannot moderate the product attention guided processing of an individual’s expectation based on long-term association.This study enriches and expands the discussion on the internal mechanism of attention processing,and has certain implications for how to improve individuals’ task performance and promote their learning.