CONTEXTUAL EFFECTS ON GENERAL LEARNING, FEATURE LEARNING, AND ATTENTION STRENGTHENING IN VISUAL-SEARCH

Context has an important influence on performance in a variety of task s. In the present experiment, the context of interest was the number o f consecutive trials under identical search conditions. We were intere sted in how individuals learn to benefit from one form of contextual c ues, the time course of such benefit, and the effects of contextual ma nipulations on general learning, feature learning, and automatic proce ss development. We investigated these issues using a visual search tas k in which we could manipulate both consistency and learning context. The results suggest that the manipulation of context influenced featur e learning; that is, at least 10 consecutive trials were required befo re optimal scanning strategies could be developed and/or instituted. H owever, the training context manipulation did not affect the acquisiti on of an automatic attention response in a consistent task or the acqu isition of a general skill for a varied task. Implications for task an d system design and the development of training programs are discussed .