I hate going grocery shopping, so when I go to the supermarket, I usually have a shopping list and try to quickly find what I want in the sea of grocery objects on each aisle to finish as soon as possible. I guess I’ve got better at this over the years, but I still don’t like it.

If I let my inner cognitive-science-nerd voice speak, it would say that this is just a visual search task. Each item on my list could be thought of as a visual target that I quickly search among the visual distractors in the area.

Interestingly, other situations have a similar structure without necessarily feeling unpleasant. For example, when joining a group of friends in a crowded restaurant or club, you may find yourself looking for a familiar face among a sea of faces and show a big bright smile when making eye contact with someone in your group. A more pleasant example of a visual search, isn’t it?

Generally speaking, we get better with practice, but could practice be even better when doing something we like? Irene Reppa and Siné McDougall (pictured below) examine this question in their paper “Practice makes perfect, especially when doing what we like,” published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, a journal of the Psychonomic Society.

Visual search task and experimental manipulations

Visual search tasks involve participants looking for a target visual stimulus that is presented (or not) along a set of visual distractors. Performance in the task can be measured in terms of speed (i.e. reaction time or RT) and accuracy.

Visual search paradigms are a well-understood methodology for which the effect of diverse manipulations has been consistently described. Generally speaking, a larger set of distractors and using more visually complex tasks decreases performance, whereas having more experience with the task increases it.

An example of a trial in this type of task is shown in the figure below. As you can see, after starting the display, a visual target to search appears on the screen, and later, a set of visual stimuli, including distractors that may (or may not) include the visual target presented in the previous step, appears. Participants must respond whether the target was present or not, and their performance is measured in terms of whether their response was correct and their RT.

The authors used two sets of stimuli, one for each of their two experiments. The stimuli sets manipulated the visual complexity of the visual targets and how appealing or unappealing they were. The figure below shows examples of the stimuli used in the experiment.

The top row shows example stimuli used in Experiment 1 (which were also used in a previous experiment), which vary in terms of whether they are simple or complex, and whether they are appealing or unappealing. The bottom row shows example stimuli used in Experiment 2, where participants used a novel stimuli set manipulated in similar dimensions.

A crucial experimental design decision was to include a “task switch” manipulation. Task switching paradigms involve a change of conditions in the course of an experiment and often show a cost in participants’ performance (such as decreased accuracy or increased RT) following the change of conditions.

In this experiment, the task switching manipulation involved a change in the appeal level of the visual targets at the experiment’s midpoint. In other words, participants performed the visual search task looking for appealing stimuli in the first half of the experiment and unappealing stimuli in the second half, or vice versa.

The manipulation is quite clever because the appeal of the stimuli is a variable controlled by the experimenters, but whether the stimuli deemed to be “appealing” or “unappealing” actually were perceived as such by the participants (or at least were processed differently at the cognitive level) could only be revealed by the presence of distinct behavioral effects due to the manipulation!

Improving with practice (but only for appealing stimuli)

Some of the analyses revealed typical and expected patterns in visual search tasks. For example, using larger sets of distractors increased RTs, and, for the most part, searching for more visually complex stimuli also increased RTs. These effects are logical and align well with known effects in visual search tasks, confirming base expectations.

But without a doubt, the most interesting results involve the visual appeal of the stimuli.

The figure below summarizes the results. In each panel, the y-axis represents participants’ RT, and the x-axis breaks down the RT data into 2 blocks divided into 4 epochs (i.e., each epoch represents 25% of the trials in a block). In each block, participants performed the visual search task, looking only for appealing or unappealing visual targets.

At a glance, participants who first practiced the task with unappealing stimuli showed a marked benefit in performance after the task switch, as their RTs decreased when looking for appealing visual targets (see the green ellipse in the right panel above).

In contrast, participants who first practiced the task with appealing stimuli and then switched to searching for unappealing stimuli did not show this benefit. In fact, their RTs increased to similar levels as earlier epochs of the visual search task, when they had less experience (see the pink ellipse in the left panel above).

In addition to showing that participants benefited from previous practice in the task when searching for appealing (but not for unappealing) stimuli, observing these patterns also demonstrated that the appealing vs. unappealing stimuli sets were indeed processed differently in cognitive terms.

Additional analyses also showed that participants processed appealing stimuli faster than unappealing stimuli (especially for complex stimuli), implying a facilitating effect from visually appealing stimuli for learning and performing the task over time.

In the words of the authors,

“That practice makes perfect more for appealing stimuli but not for unappealing stimuli is a novel finding with significant implications for learning. That appealing stimuli benefit more with practice than their unappealing counterparts speaks to the power of aesthetic appeal to facilitate learning.”

For me, these results seem like the perfect excuse to go to more social events and look for familiar faces in crowded places and to avoid grocery shopping as much as possible. After all, I can say that I’m just trying to achieve cognitive benefits.

Psychonomic Society’s article featured in this post

Reppa, I. & McDougall, S. (2025) Practice makes perfect, especially when doing what we like. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-025-03031-8