Contextual cueing: implicit memory of tactile context facilitates tactile search.

Leonardo Assumpção,Thomas Geyer,Xuelian Zang,Hermann J Müller,Zhuanghua Shi

doi:10.3758/s13414-015-0848-y

Leonardo Assumpção, Thomas Geyer + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-015-0848-y

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Abstract

In visual search, participants detect and subsequently discriminate targets more rapidly when these are embedded in repeatedly encountered distractor arrangements, an effect termed contextual cueing (Chun & Jiang Cognitive Psychology, 36, 28–71, 1998). However, whereas previous studies had explored contextual cueing exclusively in visual search, in the present study we examined the effect in tactile search using a novel tactile search paradigm. Participants were equipped with vibrotactile stimulators attached to four fingers on each hand. A given search array consisted of four stimuli (i.e., two items presented to each hand), with the target being an odd-one-out feature singleton that differed in frequency (Exps. 1 and 2) or waveform (Exp. 3) from the distractor elements. Participants performed a localization (Exps. 1 and 2) or discrimination (Exp. 3) task, delivering their responses via foot pedals. In all three experiments, reaction times were faster when the arrangement of distractor fingers predicted the target finger. Furthermore, participants were unable to explicitly discriminate repeated from nonrepeated tactile configurations (Exps. 2 and 3). This indicates that the tactile modality can mediate the formation of configural representations and use these representations to guide tactile search.

Highlights

In visual search, participants detect and subsequently discriminate targets more rapidly when these are embedded in repeatedly encountered distractor arrangements, an effect termed contextual cueing (Chun & Jiang Cognitive Psychology, 36, 28–71, 1998)
One can conclude that reliable tactile contextual cueing developed over the course of the tactile search task
Experiment 1 employed a tactile search task in order to test whether tactile spatial context can be learned under exclusively tactile search conditions

Summary

Introduction

Participants detect and subsequently discriminate targets more rapidly when these are embedded in repeatedly encountered distractor arrangements, an effect termed contextual cueing (Chun & Jiang Cognitive Psychology, 36, 28–71, 1998). The beneficial effect of environmental information on visual selective attention was further elucidated by Chun and Jiang (1998), by means of their contextual-cueing paradigm In this task, participants have to detect and subsequently discriminate the orientation (left vs right) of a target BT^ embedded in a set of distractor BL^s. When participants were asked to discriminate the repeated from the nonrepeated displays, explicit recognition was only at chance level This dissociation in direct (recognition) and indirect (RT) measures led Chun and Jiang to surmise that contextual cueing is supported by an implicit memory system. Additional work has shown that contextual learning (i.e., the acquisition of contextual memory) and expression (i.e., the retrieval of contextual memory) are separate processes (Chaumon, Schwartz, & TallonBaudry, 2009) and that an additional (spatial working memory) task interferes with the retrieval, but not the learning, of contextual memory representations (Annac et al, 2013)

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