Attention Directs Actions in Visual Foraging

Visual foraging tasks, where participants collect items by touching or clicking on them, havebecome popular for investigating visual search. They probe selective attention in multi-targetcontexts through naturalistic goal-directed actions, unlike the button presses used in many otherparadigms. Despite their potential, such tasks had not been used to examine the interplay ofattention and goal-directed actions until now, even though this topic has been extensively studiedwith other paradigms and has significant implications for understanding human visual behavior inthe real world. In this study, we applied the visual foraging paradigm to address this gap. We foundthat attentional prioritization of one part in a two-part compound object is accompanied by a motorbias in the collecting action (stylus tap) toward the prioritized part. This bias combines with motorprecision demands, such as aiming for stable contact points. Our findings show that actionplanning not only modulates the attentional landscape at large but also that attentional asymmetries(e.g., prioritizing one object part) feedback into the motor system, combining with motoric factorsto refine goal-directed actions