Jeunghwan Choi¹, Sang Chul Chong^1,2; ¹Graduate Program in Cognitive Science, Yonsei University, ²Department of Psychology, Yonsei University

People can find a target more quickly in a familiar context than in a novel one, a phenomenon known as contextual cueing (Chun & Jiang, 1998). In most contextual cueing experiments, participants are asked to search for a ‘T’-shaped target among ‘L’-shaped distractors and report its orientation. The trial is terminated immediately after the response. However, real-world visual search often involves detecting more than one target. In such situations, not only is the rapid detection of the first target important, but also it is critical to determine whether another target is absent, or to locate it efficiently if it is present. To investigate these situations, we conducted a contextual cueing experiment in which participants searched for a ‘T’-shaped target among ‘L’-shaped distractors. Each display contained either one or two targets. Participants were asked to click on all targets present in the display and press the space bar to terminate the search when they believed no additional target remained. Both one-target and two-target conditions included repeated and novel displays, allowing us to measure contextual cueing. Our results showed that search termination was significantly faster in repeated displays than in novel ones for both the one-target and two-target conditions. This reduction in termination time was primarily driven by faster detection of the first target. In one-target displays, participants continued to search longer after detecting the target in repeated displays than in novel displays. In two-target displays, contextual cueing for the interval between the first and second target detection was weak; however, participants selected the two targets in a more consistent order in repeated displays than in novel ones. These findings demonstrate that contextual cueing facilitates visual search in repeated displays by allowing people to rely primarily on information from the first detected target, even when multiple targets may be present.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT)(RS-2022-NR070542).