Abstract
Visual search is facilitated when observers encounter targets in repeated display arrangements. This ‘contextual-cueing’ (CC) effect is attributed to incidental learning of spatial distractor-target relations. Prior work has typically used only one recognition measure (administered after the search task) to establish whether CC is based on implicit or explicit memory of repeated displays, with the outcome depending on the diagnostic accuracy of the test. The present study compared two explicit memory tests to tackle this issue: yes/no recognition of a given search display as repeated versus generation of the quadrant in which the target (which was replaced by a distractor) had been located during the search task, thus closely matching the processes involved in performing the search. While repeated displays elicited a CC effect in the search task, both tests revealed above-chance knowledge of repeated displays, though explicit-memory accuracy and its correlation with contextual facilitation in the search task were more pronounced for the generation task. These findings argue in favor of a one-system, explicit-memory account of CC. Further, they demonstrate the superiority of the generation task for revealing the explicitness of CC, likely because both the search and the memory task involve overlapping processes (in line with ‘transfer-appropriate processing’).
Highlights
Visual search is facilitated when observers encounter targets in repeated display arrangements
While contextual cueing is a well-established facilitator in visual search tasks[3], there is an ongoing controversy whether cueing is reliant on a unitary—explicit-memory system[4,5], or whether it is more appropriate to assume two independent—implicit and explicit-memory systems supporting contextual cueing of search and recognition of encountered scenes, r espectively[6,7]
Analyzing contextual cueing at the level of individual search arrays, while at the same time quantifying these displays in terms of spatial layout information, opens up new possibilities for the test of the above models on the coupling of contextual cueing in visual search and explicit memory tasks
Summary
Visual search is facilitated when observers encounter targets in repeated display arrangements. The present study compared two explicit memory tests to tackle this issue: yes/no recognition of a given search display as repeated versus generation of the quadrant in which the target (which was replaced by a distractor) had been located during the search task, closely matching the processes involved in performing the search. While repeated displays elicited a CC effect in the search task, both tests revealed above-chance knowledge of repeated displays, though explicit-memory accuracy and its correlation with contextual facilitation in the search task were more pronounced for the generation task. These findings argue in favor of a onesystem, explicit-memory account of CC. Our particular focus was on how spatial memory for repeated displays expressed in the search task would relate to measures of memory obtained in the explicit tasks
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