Do Preferred and Trusted Attention Cues Support Better Visual Search Performance?

As automated aids become more integrated into daily life and safety-critical tasks, understanding how preference and trust relate to performance becomes important. Automated aids can vary in design, and users may prefer or trust some implementations more than others, even when those subjective judgments do not align with objective performance. In the current study, participants completed a visual search task in virtual reality using different types of cues to search for objects. After the search task, participants responded to questions assessing their preference for and trust in the cue designs. Participants performed better with their most preferred cue than they did on average across the remaining cues, whereas participants did not reliably perform better with their most trusted cue. These findings show that preference and trust provide distinct information about cue designs and highlight the importance of considering both subjective endorsement and objective performance when designing attention cues.