Aner Zheng¹ (), Sang Chul Chong¹; ¹Yonsei University

Contextual cueing is a phenomenon where visual search becomes faster in repeated contexts. Previous studies have suggested that contextual cueing is based on only stimuli near the target (Brady & Chun, 2007; Olson & Chun, 2002). These experiments had a spatial constraint, where only three stimuli were presented within a quadrant. We hypothesized that this spatial constraint restricted the scope of context learning. We compared contextual cueing effects when the spatial constraint was either present or absent. The task was to find a T-shaped target among 11 L-shaped distractors. We manipulated the structure of a display (constrained vs. non-constrained), scope (global vs. local), and repetition (repeated vs. non-repeated). The constrained condition was a between-subject, while the other conditions were within-subject variables. In the constrained condition, three stimuli were presented in each quadrant, whereas all 12 stimuli were presented randomly in the non-constrained condition. In the global-repeated condition, all stimuli were presented at the same location in every block. In the local-repeated condition, only the two distractors and the target were repeated. These three locally repeated stimuli were confined to one quadrant in the constrained condition, whereas they were the target and its two closest distractors in the non-constrained condition. In the non-repeated condition, all stimuli were randomly generated and the potential locations of a target were the same as in the repeated condition. In the constrained condition, we found the contextual cueing effects in both the global and local conditions. However, in the non-constrained condition, we did not find the effect in the local condition. Therefore, the perception of a spatial structure, such as a quadrant, may serve as a cue to divide a display into four distinct areas. This division could result in the limitation of learning to only the distractors presented in the same quadrant as the target.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (NRF-2022R1A2C3004133).