Contextual Cueing Paradigm Research Articles

Semantic contextual cuing and visual attention.

Since M. M. Chun and Y. Jiang's (1998) original study, a large body of research based on the contextual cuing paradigm has shown that the visuocognitive system is capable of capturing certain regularities in the environment in an implicit way. The present study investigated whether regularities based on the semantic category membership of the context can be learned implicitly and whether that learning depends on attention. The contextual cuing paradigm was used with lexical displays in which the semantic category of the contextual words either did or did not predict the target location. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that implicit contextual cuing effects can be extended to semantic category regularities. Experiments 3 and 4 indicated an implicit contextual cuing effect when the predictive context appeared in an attended color but not when the predictive context appeared in an ignored color. However, when the previously ignored context suddenly became attended, it immediately facilitated performance. In contrast, when the previously attended context suddenly became ignored, no benefit was observed. Results suggest that the expression of implicit semantic knowledge depends on attention but that latent learning can nevertheless take place outside the attentional field.

Anterior prefrontal involvement in implicit contextual change detection

Anterior prefrontal cortex is usually associated with high level executive functions. Here, we show that the frontal pole, specifically left lateral frontopolar cortex, is involved in signaling change in implicitly learned spatial contexts, in the absence of conscious change detection. In a variant of the contextual cueing paradigm, participants first learned contingencies between distractor contexts and target locations implicitly. After learning, repeated distractor contexts were paired with new target locations. Left lateral frontopolar [Brodmann area (BA) 10] and superior frontal (BA9) cortices showed selective signal increase for this target location change in repeated displays in an event-related fMRI experiment, which was most pronounced in participants with high contextual facilitation before the change. The data support the view that left lateral frontopolar cortex is involved in signaling contextual change to posterior brain areas as a precondition for adaptive changes of attentional resource allocation. This signaling occurs in the absence of awareness of learned contingencies or contextual change.

Implicit memory for spatial context in depression and schizophrenia.

Deficits in explicit spatial memory, as well as abnormalities of the hippocampus and neighboring medial temporal structures, have been documented in schizophrenia and depression. Recent evidence relying on the contextual cueing paradigm has shown that integrity of these structures is crucial not only for explicit memory but also for implicit spatial memory. Using this paradigm, the authors show that implicit memory for spatial context is severely impaired in clinically depressed patients but reaches a normal level in schizophrenia patients, although in these patients, acquisition is slower than in controls. By contrast, implicit memory for isolated locations and colors is normal in both schizophrenia and depressed patients. These findings suggest an implicit memory impairment specific to spatial context in depression. The implications for research on the differences between schizophrenia and depression in abnormalities of the hippocampal system and for research on the neural correlates of contextual cueing are discussed.

Contextual cueing based on specific and categorical properties of the environment

During the analysis of a visual scene, top-down processing is constantly directing the subject's attention to the zones of interest in the scene. The contextual cueing paradigm developed by Chun and Jiang (1998) shows how contextual regularities can facilitate the search for a particular element via implicit learning mechanisms. The study presented here reports three experiments that used this paradigm. Experiment 1 showed that regularities in the specific elements of the context can act as cues to the location of the target. Experiments 2 and 3 explored a novel aspect of contextual regularities, namely semantic regularities based on the categorization of contextual elements. Contextual cueing effects were obtained when semantic-category membership of the context predicted the target location. Moreover, in all three experiments, contextual cueing effects were obtained implicitly. The results suggest that in target-detection tasks, implicit learning can be based not only on the specific constituents of the context, but also on the semantic categories of those constituents, depending on their predictive power.

Implicit scene learning is viewpoint dependent.

When novel scenes are encoded, the representations of scene layout are generally viewpoint specific. Past studies of scene recognition have typically required subjects to explicitly study and encode novel scenes, but in everyday visual experience, it is possible that much scene learning occurs incidentally. Here, we examine whether implicitly encoded scene layouts are also viewpoint dependent. We used the contextual cuing paradigm, in which search for a target is facilitated by implicitly learned associations between target locations and novel spatial contexts (Chun & Jiang, 1998). This task was extended to naturalistic search arrays with apparent depth. To test viewpoint dependence, the viewpoint of the scenes was varied from training to testing. Contextual cuing and, hence, scene context learning decreased as the angular rotation from training viewpoint increased. This finding suggests that implicitly acquired representations of scene layout are viewpoint dependent.

Perceptual constraints on implicit learning of spatial context

Invariant spatial relationships of objects may provide a rich source of contextual information. Visual context can assist localization of individual objects via an implicit learning mechanism, as revealed in the contextual cueing paradigm (Chun & Jiang, 1998). What defines a visual context? How robust is contextual learning? And is it perceptually constrained? Here we investigate whether both local context that surround a target, and long-range context that does not spatially coincide with a target, can influence target localization. In the contextual cueing task, participants implicitly learned a context by repeated exposure to items arranged in invariant patterns. Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that only local context facilitates target localization. However, Experiment 3 showed that long range context can prime target location when target and context are not separated by random information. Experiment 4 showed that grouping by colour does not affect contextual cueing, suggesting that spatial features play a more important role than surface features in spatial contextual cueing. In separate analyses, visual hemifield differences were found for learning and performance. In sum, the results indicate that implicit learning of spatial context is robust across noise and biased towards spatially grouped information.