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. 2024 Nov;86(8):2575-2588.
doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-02966-8. Epub 2024 Oct 10.

Contextual cuing survives an interruption from an endogenous cue for attention

Tom Beesley  1 , Louise Earl  2 , Hope Butler  2 , Inez Sharp  2 , Ieva Jaceviciute  2 , David Luque  3
Affiliations

Contextual cuing survives an interruption from an endogenous cue for attention

Tom Beesley et al. Atten Percept Psychophys. 2024 Nov.

Abstract

Three experiments explored how the repetition of a visual search display guides search during contextual cuing under conditions in which the search process is interrupted by an instructional (endogenous) cue for attention. In Experiment 1, participants readily learned about repeated configurations of visual search, before being presented with an endogenous cue for attention towards the target on every trial. Participants used this cue to improve search times, but the repeated contexts continued to guide attention. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the presence of the endogenous cue did not impede the acquisition of contextual cuing. Experiment 3 confirmed the hypothesis that the contextual cuing effect relies largely on localized distractor contexts, following the guidance of attention. Together, the experiments point towards an interplay between two drivers of attention: after the initial guidance of attention, memory representations of the context continue to guide attention towards the target. This suggests that the early part of visual search is inconsequential for the development and maintenance of the contextual cuing effect, and that memory representations are flexibly deployed when the search procedure is dramatically interrupted.

Keywords: Attention; Contextual cuing; Endogenous cuing; Incidental learning; Visual search.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics Approval: Ethical approval was granted by the Department of Psychology Ethics Committee, Lancaster University, conforming to the British Psychological Society Code of Ethics and Conduct. Consent to Participate: All participants gave informed consent to participate in the study. All data was stored anonymously at the point of collection. Consent for Publication: All participants gave informed consent for their (anonymized) data to be used in publication.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Schematic of the manipulation of target position in consistent and inconsistent trials of phase 2. The dashed lines show the division of the stimuli into quadrants, but were not present in the task procedure
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
RT data for Experiment 1. The phase 2 averages across the four trial types are shown inset. Within-subject error bars were computed by a process of normalizing the RT data for the sample (Cousineau, 2005)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
RT data for Experiment 2. Error bars show standard error of the mean on normalized data
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
RT data for Experiment 3. Error bars show standard error of the mean on normalized data
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