Abstract
In studies on probabilistic cuing of visual search, participants search for a target among several distractors and report some feature of the target. In a biased stage the target appears more frequently in one specific area of the search display. Eventually, participants become faster at finding the target in that rich region compared to the sparse region. In some experiments, this stage is followed by an unbiased stage, where the target is evenly located across all regions of the display. Despite this change in the spatial distribution of targets, search speed usually remains faster when the target is located in the previously rich region. The persistence of the bias even when it is no longer advantageous has been taken as evidence that this phenomenon is an attentional habit. The aim of this meta-analysis was to test whether the magnitude of probabilistic cuing decreases from the biased to the unbiased stage. A meta-analysis of 42 studies confirmed that probabilistic cuing during the unbiased stage was roughly half the size of cuing during the biased stage, and this decrease persisted even after correcting for publication bias. Thus, the evidence supporting the claim that probabilistic cuing is an attentional habit might not be as compelling as previously thought.
Highlights
The allocation of attentional resources to objects in the environment is influenced by previous experience (Gaspelin & Luck, 2018; Theeuwes, 2018; Vecera et al, 2014)
The main goal of the present study was to test whether the decrease of probabilistic cuing during the unbiased stage is an peculiarity of just a handful of studies or, alternatively, is a general feature of the body of evidence collected with this task that might not always reach statistical significance due to the small samples used in many of these studies
The average effect size in the unbiased stage was numerically lower, dz = 0.69, 95% CI [0.60, 0.78], z = 14.91, p < .001, and heterogeneity was slightly smaller but still significant, Q(41) = 70.35, p = .003, I2 = 40.42%
Summary
The allocation of attentional resources to objects in the environment is influenced by previous experience (Gaspelin & Luck, 2018; Theeuwes, 2018; Vecera et al, 2014). When we want to turn on the lights in a room, we look for the switch at locations around half the height of the door, next to it and inside the room, because based on our previous experience we know that this is where switches usually are This phenomenon, known as probabilistic cuing or location probability learning, improves the efficiency of visual search (e.g., Geng & Behrmann, 2005). In the biased learning stage, participants carry out the probabilistic cuing task as described above for several hundreds of trials This stage is followed by an unbiased testing stage, where the target is evenly located across the different regions of the display
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