Associative learning between target and distractor layout and location probability cueing in the same visual search task

The contextual cueing effect (CCE) is a phenomenon that shows that our brains can take advantage of invariant contextual information in our environment to help us locate targets or relevant information more efficiently. In a seminal study by Chun and Jiang (1998), participants searched for a target letter “T” among “L” distractors. Unbeknownst to the participants, some trials had repeated configurations, while others had novel ones. Participants found the “T” faster in repeated configurations, showing implicit learning. Classical studies demonstrated learning of only single context-target pairing. However, recent research (Wang et al., 2020) shows that learning could also happen for repeated contexts paired with one of multiple (e.g., 4) target locations. In the current study, we intended to examine such learning at the individual scene level by producing matching target eccentricity between a pair of repeated and novel scenes. We varied the magnitude of four target eccentricities by producing equal spacing (in Experiment 1) or variable spacing (in Experiments 2 and 3) of both repeated and novel scenes. Experiment 1 showed comparable learning for different target locations with different eccentricities except for targets with the smallest eccentricity. In Experiment 2, we compared conditions with targets concentrated on the larger versus smaller eccentricity range in a between-subject design, and we found that at least when the target appeared in a large eccentricity, CCE was larger when the target appeared in the distribution condition with larger eccentricity bias than distribution with low eccentricity bias. However, this trend appeared present even in the classical contextual cueing paradigm with one target paired with one repeated context. In Experiment 3, we performed the same manipulation of eccentricity distribution in the classical contextual cueing paradigm and found the effect seen in Experiment 2 was not robust. These results suggest that when a given target could be paired with multiple repeated contexts, the learning of target-context association is more flexible and can be modulated by the target's location probability.

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