LAUSR

Humans routinely organize or reconfigure the environment as part of their everyday activities, such as placing a set of keys in a designated location to reduce the need to remember its location. This type of spatial organization is widely thought to reduce both the physical and cognitive demands of a task in order to allow individuals to perform tasks more easily. Although spatial organization can be a useful strategy when searching for items in the environment, individuals do not always choose to utilize these organizational strategies when carrying out everyday tasks. Across three experiments, we examined individuals' preference for spatial organization in the context of a real-world search task, and the degree to which individuals engaged in time- and effort-based cost-benefit analysis to inform whether to choose between an organization-based or non-organization-based search strategy. We found that individuals' strategy preferences could be explained by the perceived task time associated with each strategy, but not perceived task effort. However, even statistically controlling for relative perceived task time or reported effort, participants showed a strong systematic preference against organization prior to engaging in the task, and, post-task, a strong preference towards organization. Implications for understanding individuals' use of spatial organization are discussed.