Abstract
People search targets more efficiently in repeated displays than in novel displays (contextual cueing; Chun & Jiang, 1988). It is well known that target-distractor associations could guide attention to the target location. However, studies have found conflicting results on whether repeated displays without a target could produce contextual cueing effects (Beesley et al., 2015; Geyer et al., 2010) or not (Kunar & Wolfe, 2011; Schankin et al., 2011). We first tested three factors that might influence the strength of distractor-distractor associations which can enable the contextual cueing effect in the target absent condition (Experiments 1 & 2), and then investigated how it produced faster responses on repeated target absent trials using an eye-tracking method (Experiment 3). The first factor was a set size (8 or 16), the second one was the number of repeated displays (8 or 16), and the last one was the heterogeneity of distractors’ properties (homogeneously or heterogeneously colored distractors). Experiment 1 varied the first two factors and the third factor was varied across Experiments 1 and 2. In all experiments, participants were asked to find a T shape (target) among L shapes (distractors). In Experiments 1 and 2, we found the consistent contextual cueing effect in the target present condition. However, only the heterogeneously colored distractors produced the contextual cueing effect in the target absent condition. In Experiment 3, we found that this contextual cueing effect in the target absent condition was due to lower number of fixations and larger mean saccadic amplitudes on repeated absent trials. Overall, these results suggest that the distractor-distractor associations formed and facilitated by the heterogeneity of distractors’ properties induce a large attentional window. This makes it possible to reject more distractors at the same time such that people terminated a visual search faster on repeated target absent trials.
Acknowledgement: This research was supported by the Brain Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (NRF-2017M3C7A1029658).