Pre-Exposure of Repeated Search Configurations Facilitates Subsequent Contextual Cuing of Visual Search

Contextual cuing is the enhancement of visual search when the configuration of distractors has been experienced previously. It has been suggested that contextual cuing relies on associative learning between the distractor locations and the target position. Four experiments examined the effect of pre-exposing configurations of consistent distractors on subsequent contextual cuing. The findings demonstrate a facilitation of subsequent cuing for pre-exposed configurations compared to novel configurations that have not been pre-exposed. This facilitation suggests that learning of repeated visual search patterns involves acquisition of not just distractor-target associations but also associations between distractors within the search context, an effect that is not captured by the Brady and Chun (2007) connectionist model of contextual cuing. We propose a new connectionist model of contextual cuing that learns associations between repeated distractor stimuli, enabling it to predict an effect of pre-exposure on contextual cuing.