Abstract
Selective attention determines the effectiveness of implicit contextual learning (e.g., Jiang and Leung, 2005). Visual foreground-background segmentation, on the other hand, is a key process in the guidance of attention (Wolfe, 2003). In the present study, we examined the impact of foreground-background segmentation on contextual cueing of visual search in three experiments. A visual search display, consisting of distractor ‘L’s and a target ‘T’, was overlaid on a task-neutral cuboid on the same depth plane (Experiment 1), on stereoscopically separated depth planes (Experiment 2), or spread over the entire display on the same depth plane (Experiment 3). Half of the search displays contained repeated target-distractor arrangements, whereas the other half was always newly generated. The task-neutral cuboid was constant during an initial training session, but was either rotated by 90° or entirely removed in the subsequent test sessions. We found that the gains resulting from repeated presentation of display arrangements during training (i.e., contextual-cueing effects) were diminished when the cuboid was changed or removed in Experiment 1, but remained intact in Experiments 2 and 3 when the cuboid was placed in a different depth plane, or when the items were randomly spread over the whole display but not on the edges of the cuboid. These findings suggest that foreground-background segmentation occurs prior to contextual learning, and only objects/arrangements that are grouped as foreground are learned over the course of repeated visual search.
Highlights
In everyday life, we constantly receive a massive amount of sensory input that would require an unrealistic amount of cognitive resources to be all processed
The first is that the search-guiding contextual associations acquired during the training session were established with reference to the cuboid, despite the fact that the cuboid itself was completely non-informative with respect to the target location
We hypothesized that placing the cuboid in a separate, more distant, depth plane than the search array would effectively assign the former to the background, permitting contextual learning of only the item configuration in the foreground
Summary
We constantly receive a massive amount of sensory input that would require an unrealistic amount of cognitive resources to be all processed. When participants are asked about display repetitions in an explicit old-display recognition test at the end of the search experiment, they are typically unable to discriminate old from new displays to a level better than chance. This has led to the idea that contextual cueing is an implicit-memory effect, though the role of consciousness in contextual cueing has become a controversial issue recently (for a review, see Vadillo et al, 2015)
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