Influences of luminance contrast and ambient lighting on visual context learning and retrieval

Abstract

Invariant spatial context can guide attention and facilitate visual search, an effect referred to as “contextual cueing.” Most previous studies on contextual cueing were conducted under conditions of photopic vision and high search item to background luminance contrast, leaving open the question whether the learning and/or retrieval of context cues depends on luminance contrast and ambient lighting. Given this, we conducted three experiments (each contains two subexperiments) to compare contextual cueing under different combinations of luminance contrast (high/low) and ambient lighting (photopic/mesopic). With high-contrast displays, we found robust contextual cueing in both photopic and mesopic environments, but the acquired contextual cueing could not be transferred when the display contrast changed from high to low in the photopic environment. By contrast, with low-contrast displays, contextual facilitation manifested only in mesopic vision, and the acquired cues remained effective following a switch to high-contrast displays. This pattern suggests that, with low display contrast, contextual cueing benefited from a more global search mode, aided by the activation of the peripheral rod system in mesopic vision, but was impeded by a more local, fovea-centered search mode in photopic vision.

The effect of luminance contrast between sign and surrounding object on gaze behavior: A study in virtual metro station environment with rendered static/dynamic panorama

“…Lin et al [38] found a highly positive correlation between subjective discomfort caused by luminance contrast and eye movement speed, which was consistent with our findings, that is, in the higher luminance contrast, the eye kept moving with a stronger feeling of glare. Pakkert et al [39] concluded in their study that presenting a small number of lights yielded improvement would not show in the task performance.…”

Task-Irrelevant Context Learned Under Rapid Display Presentation: Selective Attention in Associative Blocking

“…To answer this question, we combined relevantirrelevant color subsets in the learning and transfer phases with a rapid presentation paradigm to direct participants' attention to the task-irrelevant subsets of items. In greater detail, in a recent study, Zang et al (2020) demonstrated that participants were able to show a stable contextual cueing effect even when the search items were presented for only 300 ms. The authors revealed that the contextual cueing effect was established under rapid presentation only when the global configuration of items was repeated across trials.…”

“…Together, these results show that longer presentation time facilitates local context learning; however, the rapid display presentation only allows sufficient time for global attention. In other words, it forces participants' attention to the whole global context relative to only a subset of items (see Zang et al, 2020).…”