Learning of association between a context and multiple possible target locations in a contextual cueing paradigm
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Learning of association between a context and multiple possible target locations in a contextual cueing paradigm Chao Wang 1,2 & Xuejun Bai 3 & Yabo Hui 3 & Chen Song 3 & Guang Zhao 3 & Hanna Haponenko 1 & Bruce Milliken 1 & Hong-jin Sun 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Searching for a target is faster in a repeated context compared to a new context, possibly because the learned contextual information guides visual attention to the target location (attentional guidance). Previous studies showed that switching the target location following learning, or having the target appear in one of multiple possible locations during learning, fails to produce search facilitation in repeated contexts. In this study, we re-examined whether the learning of an association between a distractor configuration context and a target is limited to one-to-one context-target associations. Visual search response times were facilitated even when a repeated context was associated with one of four possible target locations, provided the target locations were also shared by other repeated distractor contexts. These results suggest that contextual cueing may involve mechanisms other than attentional guidance by one-to-one context-target associations. Keywords Contextual cueing . Visual search . Implicit learning . Associative learning
Introduction
The contextual cueing effect (CCE)
Although visual scenes are typically complex, there are often regularities embedded in scenes. The ability to extract such regularities is a key property of our cognitive system (Reber, 1967; Turk-Browne, Jungé, & Scholl, 2005). One such type of regularity is the spatial layout of objects in the environment. Extensive research has demonstrated that humans are able to learn to utilize repetitions in spatial layout (Goujon, Didierjean, & Thorpe, 2015; Reber, 1989). One example of this type of visual learning is the contextual cueing effect (CCE; Chun & Jiang, 1998). CCE occurs when visual search performance is improved by the repeated pairing across trials of a search target and a particular spatial configuration of distractors.
In the seminal study of Chun and Jiang (1998), participants were required to search for a target letter T among rotated distractor letter Ls, and then to press one of two keys based on whether the target letter T was rotated 90° clockwise or counterclockwise from upright. Within each block, the target location and distractor context were always different between trials. Unknown to participants, for half of the trials, the distractor contexts and target locations were repeated across blocks. For the other half of the trials, the distractor contexts were always novel, appearing only once in the experiment. The results showed that reaction time (RT) became faster across blocks for the trials with repeated distractor contexts relative to the trials with novel distractor contexts. Chun and Jiang (1998) proposed that observers learned an association between distractor contexts and target location, and that this learned association
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