Seeing Healthy: Behavior Comparisons Between PC and VR Visual Search Task

Abstract

A visual search task is a psychological experiment in which participants are asked to find a specific target among a set of distractors. It is commonly used to study attention and perception, but can also be used as a training tool, for example, to help individuals practice identifying healthy food options while ignoring unhealthy ones in a visual display. The goal is to retrain attention patterns, helping to reduce automatic focus on unhealthy food cues and support healthier eating behavior. This paper explores the implementation of a visual search task with food in virtual reality (VR) and compare it to a standardized PC-based version. These two applications were developed with a consistent structure and functionality to ensure comparability. Forty participants completed both conditions. The results indicate that the core aspects of visual search performance, the reaction time and error patterns, were comparable across VR and PC. The strong positive correlation between reaction times and error rates in both conditions suggests that search behavior is stable and consistent, although the controls caused significantly slower reaction times in VR and the immersion potentially increases the cognitive load. Despite these differences, the findings suggest a promising transferability of visual search tasks into immersive environments, which opens up possibilities for a VR visual search based training to improve healthier eating habits.