Designing attention guidance for wide-field of view visual search: Local and dual cues improve search, but imperfect automation imposes costs.

Many real-world, safety-critical domains require searching for targets in complex scenes, like a pilot scanning a runway for hazards. Augmented reality (AR) displays show promise for faster, more accurate attention guidance during visual search, yet the effectiveness of cue properties and their failure modes remains underexplored. The current experiments simulate AR overlays on a wide-field-of-view (FOV) display to examine how cue properties affect search performance under perfect or imperfect automation. Across both studies, cues improved search performance relative to an unaided search. Spatial information outperformed identity information, and local cues outperformed global cues. Dual cues outperformed single cues, showing a greater benefit when targets were outside the immediate FOV. Imperfect automation degraded performance and produced an automation bias: Errors were higher when automation was incorrect than with a no-cue baseline (no automation). Miss-prone automation (Experiment 2) yielded larger response time costs than false-alarm-prone automation (Experiment 1), whereas costs to accuracy were comparable. Under miss-prone automation, dual cues slightly amplified the automation bias relative to single cues. These findings have implications for designing automated cueing aids, particularly in large search environments, where spatial precision and automation errors should be considered carefully. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).