Older adults may experience difficulties in a variety of real-world visual search tasks, which potentially result from multiple cognitive processes affected by aging, such as decline in selective attention, memory failure, or changes in explore-exploit decisions. Experimental visual foraging and “hybrid” visual and memory foraging tasks, in which participants search for several instances of one or multiple target objects across many search environments, allow us to
systematically investigate which task factors and cognitive processes contribute to age differences in complex search tasks. In this talk, we will review our recent work on (hybrid) foraging in younger and older adults. Besides the consistent finding of age-related slowing in foraging tasks, our results demonstrate that age differences in the efficiency of visual search, memory search, and explore-exploit decisions are specific to the cognitive requirements of the tasks. Overall, older adults appear to adapt their search behavior according to the demands of the foraging task, presumably to compensate for age-related decline in cognitive resources. Furthermore, we explored how foraging behavior is influenced also by other individual differences than age, such as trait curiosity and cognitive reserve.