Contextual cueing facilitation arises early in the time course of visual search: An investigation with the speed-accuracy tradeoff task

Visual search is expedited in a spatial context encountered repeatedly. A much-debated question is how early the facilitation by contextual memory arises. The current study examined the possibility of the facilitation of early attentional processing by constructing a descriptive model of the time course of visual search and its facilitation by contextual cueing. Participants in this experiment engaged in a speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) task after learning the spatial contexts in a standard visual search task in which they searched for a rotated T target among Ls. In the SAT task, they were required to search for the target and respond immediately when a sound probe was presented, even if they did not find or identify the target when the inter-stimulus interval between the search display and the probe varied from 40 ms to 2,000 ms. Participants completed two blocks of the SAT task, in which they searched in learned and new contexts. The results of the SAT procedure showed that responses were more accurate in repeated contexts than in new contexts, even when only a brief period of time elapsed after presenting the search display (> 90 ms). We conducted an analysis of the time course of contextual-cueing effects with Bayesian hierarchical modeling, which demonstrated that the rate of increase in accuracy was higher for the repeated than for the new contexts. These findings suggest that early attentional processing is enhanced by learning the contexts, and this enhancement arises very early in the time course of the visual search.