The encoding process of nonconfigural information in contextual cuing

Abstract

Jiang and Wagner (2004) demonstrated that individual target-distractor associations were learned in contextual cuing. We examined whether individual associations can be learned in efficient visual searches that do not involve attentional deployment to individual search items. In Experiment 1, individual associations were not learned during the efficient search tasks. However, in Experiment 2, where additional exposure duration of the search display was provided by presenting placeholders marking future locations of the search items, individual associations were successfully learned in the efficient search tasks and transferred to inefficient search. Moreover, Experiment 3 demonstrated that a concurrent task requiring attention does not affect the learning of the local visual context. These results clearly showed that attentional deployment is not necessary for learning individual locations and clarified how the human visual system extracts and preserves regularity in complex visual environments for efficient visual information processing.

Configural learning in contextual cuing of visual search.

“…They are however inconsistent with the conclusions of other research (Jiang & Wagner, 2004, Experiment 1; see also Jiang & Song, 2005;Ogawa & Kumada, 2008) in which search was unimpaired in a transfer phase in which trained patterns were recombined into new configurations. We return to this discrepancy later in the General Discussion.…”

The time course of attentional deployment in contextual cueing

“…Peterson and Kramer (2001) discussed the possibility that contextual cueing may have started while the placeholders were in view, although this could not be determined from their data. Geyer et al (2010) and Ogawa and Kumada (2008) used placeholders to enhance contextual cueing. In both studies, however, the search task involved feature search, which may rely primarily on the global layout for cueing.…”

“…Unfortunately, none of the previous behavioral studies directly measured the time course of contextual cueing. The interval between the onset of the premask placeholders and the search items was constant in most cases (Geyer, Zehetleitner, & Müller, 2010;Ogawa & Kumada, 2008;Peterson & Kramer, 2001). Kunar et al (2008) found that previews ranging from 400 to 1,200 ms improved search speeds.…”

“…Subsequent studies have generally adopted this theoretical framework (e.g., Geyer et al, 2010;Peterson & Kramer, 2001). Furthermore, the "layout as cue" assumption is supported by the successful use of premask placeholders to increase the robustness of contextual cueing (Geyer et al, 2010;Kunar et al, 2008;Ogawa & Kumada, 2008;Peterson & Kramer, 2001).…”

Local item density modulates adaptation of learned contextual cues

“…For instance, it is possible that in changed displays, the target and the distractors may be grouped together, thus forming a segmentable region (Conci & von Mühlenen, 2009) or a 'salient' cluster of items that is prioritized for the assignment of bottom-up attention. Thus, because the search display is removed upon the response, insufficient time may be available for the system to encode, i.e., (re-)learn, the spatial targetdistractor relations (e.g., Ogawa & Kumada, 2008) or there may be no incentive for (re-) learning as the target is found efficiently. Note that these accounts are neutral as to whether bottom-up attention affects the processes of the build-up, i.e., acquisition of a new association between the changed target position and the old distractor context or the expression, i.e., retrieval of this (adapted) representation from context memory.…”