[Effect of object consistency in a spatial contextual cueing paradigm].
Previous studies demonstrated that attention can be quickly guided to a target location in a visual search task when the spatial configurations of search items and/or the object identities were repeated in the previous trials. This phenomenon is termed contextual cueing. Recently, it was reported that spatial configuration learning and object identity learning occurred independently, when novel contours were used as search items. The present study examined whether this learning occurred independently even when the search items were meaningful. The results showed that the contextual cueing effect was observed even if the relationships between the spatial locations and object identities were jumbled (Experiment 1). However, it disappeared when the search items were changed into geometric patterns (Experiment 2). These results suggest that the spatial configuration can be learned independent of the object identities; however, the use of the learned configuration is restricted by the learning situations.
Institute for Biomedical Engineering, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, AIST Central 6, Higashi, Tsukuba 305-8566, Japan. yuji-takeda@aist.go.jp
Yuji
Y
Takeda
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D005106:Exploratory Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*