Abstract
The visual world contains a variety of implicit rules that reveal the spatial or semantic relationships (contextual cues) between different objects. The facilitation effect of the efficiency in visual search induced by these contextual cues is termed as the contextual cueing effect. Previous studies have shown that spatial contextual cueing effect can be influenced by spatial working memory load. However, it remains unclear whether the semantic contextual cueing effect is also modulated by working memory load. Further, it is unclear whether different types of working memory (e.g., spatial or verbal working memory) load have the same effects on semantic contextual cueing effect. To clarify this issue, we examined whether semantic contextual cueing effects depend on any type of working memory resources (the common resource hypothesis) or only require the specific type of working memory resources (the specific resource hypothesis). In this study, we adopted a dual-task paradigm that combined a visual search task with a working memory task. Results showed that the semantic contextual cueing effect is influenced by verbal working memory load, but not by spatial working memory load. These findings indicated that specific contextual cueing effects only depend on specific types of working memory load, which supports the specific resource hypothesis.