title: When being narrow minded is a good thing: locally biased people show stronger contextual cueing.
abstract: Repeated contexts allow us to find relevant information more easily. Learning such contexts has been proposed to depend upon either global processing of the repeated contexts, or alternatively processing of the local region surrounding the target information. In this study, we measured the extent to which observers were by default biased to process towards a more global or local level. The findings showed that the ability to use context to help guide their search was strongly related to an observer's local/global processing bias. Locally biased people could use context to help improve their search better than globally biased people. The results suggest that the extent to which context can be used depends crucially on the observer's attentional bias and thus also to factors and influences that can change this bias.
authors: a Department of Psychology , University of Warwick , Coventry , UK.
authors: Lauren
authors: L
authors: Bellaera
authors: Adrian
authors: A
authors: von Mühlenen
authors: Derrick G
authors: DG
authors: Watson
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D015982:Bias; D003210:Concept Formation; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attentional bias.; Contextual cueing; Visual search