When conducting a visual search task participants respond faster to targets embedded in a repeated array of visual distractors compared to targets embedded in a novel array, an effect referred to as contextual cueing. There are no reports of contextual cueing in audition, and generalizing this effect to the auditory domain would provide a new paradigm to investigate similarities, differences, and interactions in visual and auditory processing. In 4 experiments, participants identified a numerical target embedded in a sequence of alphabetic letter distractors. The training phase (Epochs 1, 2, and 3) of all experiments contained repeated sequences, and the testing phase (Epoch 4) contained novel sequences. Temporal contextual cueing was measured as slower response times in Epoch 4 than in Epoch 3. Repeated context was defined by the order of distractor identities and the rhythmic structure of the portion of the sequence immediately preceding the target digit, either together (Experiments 1 and 2) or separately (Experiments 3 and 4). An auditory temporal contextual cueing effect was obtained in Experiments 1, 2, and 4. This is the first report of an auditory temporal contextual cueing effect and, thus, it extends the contextual cueing effect to a new modality. This new experimental paradigm could be useful in furthering our understanding of fundamental auditory processes and could eventually be used to aid in diagnosing language deficits.

abstract: Previous research has shown that people can implicitly learn repeated visual contexts and use this information when locating relevant items. For example, when people are presented with repeated spatial configurations of distractor items or distractor identities in visual search, they become faster to find target stimuli in these repeated contexts over time (Chun and Jiang, 1998; 1999). Given that people learn these repeated distractor configurations and identities, might they also implicitly encode semantic information about distractors, if this information is predictive of the target location? We investigated this question with a series of visual search experiments using real-world stimuli within a contextual cueing paradigm (Chun and Jiang, 1998). Specifically, we tested whether participants could learn, through experience, that the target images they are searching for are always located near specific categories of distractors, such as food items or animals. We also varied the spatial consistency of target locations, in order to rule out implicit learning of repeated target locations. Results suggest that participants implicitly learned the target-predictive categories of distractors and used this information during search, although these results failed to reach significance. This lack of significance may have been due the relative simplicity of the search task, however, and several new experiments are proposed to further investigate whether repeated category information can benefit search. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2014

A long-held belief is that human attention can be deployed voluntarily according to observers’ goals (top-down) or shifted automatically to the most salience object in the environment (bottom-up). Recent studies suggest a third category of attentional control: selection history. By this view, an observer’s experience in performing a task that requires the control of attention could automatically affect subsequent attention deployment in the task. This thesis examined selection history mechanisms of attentional control in two visual search phenomena. The first phenomenon is known as the Contextual Cueing Effect (CCE), and refers to an increased search efficiency when a specific distractor configuration is repeatedly associated with a specific target location (Chun and Jiang, 1998). In one study, we found a CCE when one repeated configuration was associated with up to four different target locations, suggesting that the CCE may involve mechanisms other than attentional guidance by one-to-one context-target associations. In another study, we found that the CCE was not affected by concurrent working memory load, and that there was little correlation between the magnitude of the CCE and working memory task performance when measured separately in the same participants. These results suggest that working memory may not be involved in such contextual learning. The second phenomenon is known as the the Item-Specific Proportion Congruent (ISPC) Effect, and refers to item-specific learning that controls the extent to which salient distractors capture attention. Through manual response and eye movement measures, we demonstrate that the ISPC effect reflects the search process itself, rather than processes that precede or follow search. We propose does item-specific learning produces transient changes in the activation of goal-related processes that mediate attention capture. / Thesis / Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) / Where we attend in visual space can be affected involuntarily by memories of how we have attended to visual space in the past. In other words, automatically retrieved memories can control our visual attention independent of volition. This thesis examines two visual search phenomena that display this type of memory-based control over attention. The first phenomenon reveals that search performance improves with experience searching through the same set of visual distractors on multiple occasions. We demonstrate that this form of learning is remarkably flexible; it can occur for multiple targets associated with the same set of distractors. We also demonstrate that this form of learning probably involves long-term rather than short-term memory mechanisms. The second phenomenon reveals how memory-based processes can prevent attention from being captured by a salient distractor. Eye movement data reveal that this form of learning impacts search itself, rather the processes that precede or follow search.

In this thesis, we will explore direct and indirect measures of learning in a visual search task commonly called contextual cueing. In the first part, we present a review of the scientific literature on contextual cueing, in order to give the readers of this thesis a better general idea of existing evidence and open questions within this relatively new research field. The aims of our own experimental studies presented in the succeeding chapters are the following ones: (1) to replicate and extend the findings described in the various papers by Marvin Chun and various colleagues on contextual cueing of visual attention; (2) to explore the nature of memory representations underlying the observed learning effects, especially whether learning is actually implicit and whether memory representations are distinctive, episodic and instance-based or rather distributed, continuous and graded; (3) to extend the study of contextual cueing to more realistic visual stimuli, in order to test its robustness across various situations and validate its adaptive value in ecologically sound conditions;<p>and (4) to investigate whether such knowledge about the association between visual contexts and “meaningful” locations can be (automatically) transferred to other tasks, namely a change detection task.<p><p>In a first series of four experiments, we tried to replicate the documented contextual cueing effect using a wide range of various direct measures of learning (tasks that are supposed to be related to explicit knowledge) and we systematically varied the distinctiveness of context configurations to study its effect on both direct and indirect measures of learning. <p><p>We also ran a series of neural network simulations (briefly described in the general discussion of this thesis), based on a very simple association-learning mechanism, that not only account for the observed contextual cueing effect, but also yield rather specific predictions about future experimental data: contextual cueing effects should also be observed when repetitions of context configurations are not perfect, i.e. the networks were able to react to slightly distorted versions of repeating contexts in a similar way than they did to completely identical contexts. Human participants, we conjectured, should therefore (if the simple connectionist model captures some relevant aspects of the contextual cueing effect) become faster at detecting targets surrounded by context configurations that are only partially identical from trial to trial compared to those trials where the context configurations were randomly generated. These predictions were tested in a second series of experiments using pseudo-repeated context configurations, where some distractor items were either displaced from trial to trial or their orientation changed, while conserving their global layout. <p><p>In a third series of experiments, we used more realistic images of natural landscapes as background contexts to establish the robustness of the contextual cueing effect as well as its ecological relevance claimed by Chun and colleagues. We furthermore added a second task to these experiments to study whether the acquired knowledge about the background-target location associations would (automatically) transfer to another visual search task, namely a change detection task. If participants have learned that certain locations of the repeated images are “important”, since they contain the target item to look for, then changes occurring at those specific locations should lead to less “change blindness” than changes occurring at other irrelevant locations. We used two different types of instructions to introduce this second task after the visual search task, where we either stressed the link between the two tasks, i.e. telling them that remembering the “important” locations for each image could be used to find the changes faster, or we simply told them to perform the second task without any reference to the first one. <p><p>We will close this thesis with a general discussion, combining findings based on our review of the existing research literature and findings based on our own experimental explorations of the contextual cueing effect. By this we will discuss the implications of our empirical studies for the scientific investigation of contextual cueing and implicit learning, in terms of theoretical, empirical and methodological issues. / Doctorat en sciences psychologiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Dans cette thèse, nous avons étudié les mécanismes en jeu dans le développement et l’utilisation de connaissances relatives aux régularités présentes dans un environnement visuel, au moyen du paradigme d’indiçage contextuel. Nous avons testé l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’apprentissage de régularités contextuelles de scènes naturelles opère involontairement au cours de l’exploration visuelle et peut conduire à l’accumulation de connaissances implicites. Nous avons montré que l’effet d’indiçage contextuel et la prise de conscience des régularités sont sensibles à l’attention sélective portée aux scènes naturelles (Expériences 1 et 2a). Toutefois, les mécanismes mis en jeu lors de l’apprentissage de régularités contextuelles opèrent sans attention au cours de la recherche visuelle (Expériences 5 et 6).Nos travaux indiquent également que la prise de conscience des régularités améliore la recherche visuelle (Expériences 1 et 2a). Cependant, bien que l’expertise en rugby renforce la prise de conscience des régularités de scènes de rugby, les performances des experts en situation de recherche visuelle ne sont pas meilleures que celles de novices pour lesquels l’apprentissage est moins explicite (Expérience 4). Etant donné que la procédure des Expériences 1 à 6 ne permet pas de savoir quelles connaissances guident véritablement l’attention lors de la recherche visuelle, nous avons adapté le paradigme de l’indiçage contextuel inter-essais aux scènes naturelles. Nos résultats montrent que les connaissances relatives aux régularités catégorielles de scènes naturelles peuvent être extraites et utilisées rapidement, sans effort d’attention, aussi bien pour des scènes naturelles relevant du quotidien que de scènes issues d'un domaine d'expertise spécifique (Expériences 7a - 8). / The mechanisms involved in the development and use of contextual regularities were studied using the contextual cueing paradigm. In our research, we argue that learning contextual regularities from natural scenes occur unintentionally and implicitly during visual search. We showed that learning of contextual regularities and conscious awareness depend on how selective attention is allocated toward natural scenes (Experiments 1 and 2a). However, the mechanisms supporting the learning of contextual regularities remained unaffected by the presence of an interfering, working memory task (Experiment 5 and 6). Our studies also indicated that awareness of regularities improves performance on the visual search task (Experiments 1 and 2a). We also found that rugby expertise improved conscious awareness of regularities from rugby scenes, while visual search performance of experts was no better than performance of novices (Experiment 4). Finally, the procedure used in Experiments 1-6 does not allow to precisely determine what knowledge is used during visual search. Consequently, we have applied the paradigm of inter-trial temporal contextual cueing to natural scenes. We found evidence indicating that categorical regularities of natural scenes can be extracted and used quickly and without attentional efforts for natural scenes, independently of expertise level (7a Experience 7a - 8).

People unconsciously learn spatial information about places they encounter frequently, leading them to search through familiar scenes faster than for unfamiliar scenes. We explored this phenomenon—the contextual cueing effect—in scenes containing images of different human faces. Participants searched through a series of scenes for a target among distractors, characterized as a letter T among letter L’s with each letter positioned on top of a face image (Experiment 1) or as a female face among male faces (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that when the binding of identity and location was manipulated during learning, slightly greater (but not statistically significant) contextual cueing effects were found for repeated scenes with constant identity-to-location binding than those repeated scenes with constant spatial configurations but shuffled identity-to-location binding. Experiment 2 showed that if the binding of identity-to-location changed after the learning of a set of identity-to-location binding, small (but not statistically significant) costs of contextual cueing were found. The results suggest that in the contextual cueing paradigm, repeated identity-to-location binding might be learned but the learning of repeated spatial configurations alone account for a major portion of the learning. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

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