Two (or three) is one too many: testing the flexibility of contextual cueing with multiple target locations

Abstract

Visual search for a target object is facilitated when it is repeatedly presented within an invariant context of surrounding items ('contextual cueing';Chun & Jiang, 1998). The current study investigated whether such invariant contexts can cue more than one target location. In a series of three experiments, we show that contextual cueing is significantly reduced when invariant contexts are paired with two rather than one possible target location, whereas no contextual cueing occurs with three distinct target locations. Closer data inspection revealed that one 'dominant' target always exhibited substantially more contextual cueing than the other 'minor' target, which caused negative contextual-cueing effects. However, minor targets could benefit from the invariant context when they were spatially close to the dominant target.In sum, our experiments suggest that contextual cueing can guide visual attention to a spatially limited region of the display, only enhancing the detection of targets presented inside that region.

Transfer of contextual cueing in full-icon display remapping

“…Interestingly, contextual cueing was evident for landscape displays even after the insertion of two epochs of portrait displays. This may be taken to indicate that the cueing effect is relatively robust against interference within the same set of old configurations, consistent with previous studies (Chun & Jiang, 1998Conci & M¨uller, 2012;Jiang, Song, & Rigas, 2005;Zellin, Conci, von M¨uhlenen, & M¨uller, 2011). However, contextual cues acquired with landscape displays were transferred to portrait displays only under certain remapping conditions (those of Experiments 3 and 4), suggesting that contextual cueing is relatively inflexible and that transfer is confined to specific remapping situations.…”

Statistical learning in the past modulates contextual cueing in the future

“…In these cases, adaptation to relocated targets was not observed at all-not even when old contexts were rather permanently paired with relocated targets (Zellin et al, 2013), suggesting that only a single target location can be associated with an invariant context (Zellin et al, 2011). By contrast, here we observed contextual cueing for relocated targets when they were predictable from repeated encounters in the learning phase, specifically, when they were relocated from one old context to another old context (Experiment 1).…”

“…Reliable contextual cueing was not even observed when target relocations to previously empty positions were fairly permanent with at least twice as many presentations of the relocated targets relative to the initial target locations (Zellin, Conci, von Mühlenen, & Müller, 2013). This pattern of results suggests, on the one hand, that contextual cueing is essentially limited to single-target learning (Zellin, Conci, von Mühlenen, & Müller, 2011); that is, each old-context display can be associated with only one repeated target location (and its immediate surround; see also Makovski & Jiang, 2010), meaning that visual search for other (new) repeated target locations will not be guided by the same old context. On the other hand, the observed lack of contextual cueing for relocated targets appearing at previously empty positions might be owing to the fact that, after having learned a particular context, observers did not expect targets to appear at previously empty positions (Jiang et al, 2013;see Clark, 2013, for a theoretical approach to cognitive prediction models).…”

“…The 12 old-context displays and another 12 randomly generated new contexts were presented in random order (24 trials in total). Displays were presented with their original target locations from the initial learning phase because the explicit recognition of a given old context-if present at all-should be stronger for reliably learned context-target relationships (see preconditions above and Zellin et al, 2011Zellin et al, , 2013. The response was nonspeeded, and no error feedback was provided.…”

Whatever after Next? Adaptive Predictions Based on Short- and Long-Term Memory in Visual Search

“…For example, incidental learning of statistical regularities is usually not adapted rapidly: an attentional bias toward a predicted target location (i.e., the most likely target location) is not rapidly readjusted to change and may persist for long periods of time (Jiang et al, 2012). Moreover, learning of context-target associations is typically limited to a single target location; no further target locations are associated with a given invariant context (Zellin et al, 2011). In addition, the adaptation of learned contextual associations after a change of the target location is rather inflexible, resulting in the persistence of a misleading cue (Manginelli and Pollmann, 2009).…”