The descriptive statistics for the contextual cue learning stage are presented in
Table 3 and illustrated in
Figure 3 in white background.
A 2 (variability in the prelearning stage: high variability vs. low variability) × 2 (layout type: repeated vs. novel layout) × 8 (time course: epochs 5–12) repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted on the reaction time of this stage. The results indicated a significant main effect of layout type, F(1, 52) = 12.39, p = 0.001, η² = 0.19. Post hoc tests revealed that, compared with the novel layout, M = 875, SE = 16, the reaction time for the repeated layout, M = 846, SE = 17, was significantly faster, p = 0.001, Bonferroni corrected, indicating an overall presence of the contextual cue effect in this stage. Moreover, there was a significant main effect for time course, F(4.45, 231.5) = 26.99, p < 0.001, η² = 0.34, Greenhouse-Geisser corrected, where post hoc showed a significant decrease in reaction times from epoch 5 to epoch 8, p < 0.05, Bonferroni corrected, but no significant differences in reaction times between epoch 9 and later epochs, p > 0.05, Bonferroni corrected, indicating a practice-like trend. However, the main effect of variability in the prelearning stage was not significant, F(1, 52) = 0.45, p = 0.507, suggesting no overall significant differences in average reaction times between the two participant groups.
Regarding interaction effects, the three-way interaction of variability in the prelearning stage × layout type × time course was non-significant,
F(7, 364) = 1.24,
p = 0.279, and the two-way interactions of layout type × time course,
F(7, 364) = 1.53,
p = 0.155, and time course × variability in the prelearning stage,
F(4.45, 231.50) = 1.70,
p = 0.109, Greenhouse-Geisser corrected, were also not significant. However, the interaction between variability in the prelearning stage and layout type was significant,
F(1, 52) = 5.75,
p = 0.020, η² = 0.10. Further analysis showed no significant difference in reaction times between the novel layout,
M = 875,
SE = 22, and repeated layout,
M = 866,
SE = 24,
p = 0.431, Bonferroni corrected, for the low variability condition. Yet, in the high variability condition, the reaction time for the novel layout,
M = 874,
SE = 22, was significantly longer than that for the repeated layout,
M = 826,
SE = 24,
p < 0.001, Bonferroni corrected, revealing a pronounced contextual cue effect (
Figure 5). This result indicates that extensive searches involving novel layouts with corresponding spatial variability during the prelearning stage indeed facilitated subsequent contextual cue learning, suggesting that participants did learn clustering knowledge during the prelearning stage and applied it to subsequent scene searches.
Because there was no interaction related to the time course discovered, we conducted paired-sample
t-tests to compare the reaction times between repeated and novel layouts in epoch 12 under the low variability group to detect the presence of contextual cueing learning. The findings revealed that participants exhibit a contextual cueing effect,
t(26) = 2.569,
p = 0.016, Cohen's
d = 1.008 (
Table 3), indicating that the low variability group eventually exhibited contextual cueing effects.