Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do people generate options in everyday purchase decisions? Building on prior work, we studied how people search semantic space when generating options for daily-use products. Study 1 (N=200) showed that items coming to mind first were both more preferred and more frequently used, demonstrating that accessibility and personal preference predict retrieval order. Studies 2-3 (N=220) constructed empirically-derived feature spaces for product categories. Within these spaces, semantic distance weakly predicted generation speed, showing Lévy-like foraging but with substantial deviation. This raised the possibility that individual differences fundamentally shape semantic search in option generation. Study 4 (N=100) directly tested this interpretation, revealing that mental search is recalcitrant: broad category activation intrudes into subsequent feature-focused search, while feature-focused search first facilitates later global exploration. These findings demonstrate that option generation reflects population-level foraging dynamics modulated by individual differences in how people weight features and navigate personalized semantic neighborhoods.