Contextual cueing based on specific and categorical properties of the environment

A. Goujon (1) , A. Didierjean , E. Marmeche

1 INRETS/MA - Département Mécanismes d'Accidents

During the analysis of a visual scene, top-down processing is constantly directing the subject's attention to the zones of interest in the scene. The contextual cueing paradigm developed by Chun and Jiang (1998) shows how contextual regularities can facilitate the search for a particular element via implicit learning mechanisms. The study presented here reports three experiments that used this paradigm. Experiment 1 showed that regularities in the specific elements of the context can act as cues to the location of the target. Experiment 2 and 3 explored a novel aspect of contextual regularities, namely semantic regularities based on the categorization of contextual elements. Contextual cueing effects were obtained when semantic-category membership of the context predicted the target location. Moreover, in all three experiments, contextual cueing effects were obtained implicitly. The results suggest that in target-detection tasks, implicit learning can be based not only on the specific constituents of the context, but also on the semantic categories of those constituents, depending on their predictive power.

Domaines: Psychologie

A. Goujon, A. Didierjean, E. Marmeche. Contextual cueing based on specific and categorical properties of the environment. Visual Cognition, 2007, vol15;n3, p257-275. ⟨hal-00505948⟩