CONTEXTUAL CUEING - IMPLICIT LEARNING AND MEMORY OF VISUAL CONTEXT GUIDES SPATIAL ATTENTION

Global context plays an important, but poorly understood, role in visu al tasks. This study demonstrates that a robust memory for visual cont ext exists to guide spatial attention. Global context was operationali zed as the spatial layout of objects in visual search displays. Half o f the configurations were repeated across blocks throughout the entire session, and targets appeared within consistent locations in these ar rays. Targets appearing in learned configurations were detected more q uickly. This newly discovered form of search facilitation is termed co ntextual cueing. Contextual cueing is driven by incidentally learned a ssociations between spatial configurations (context) and target locati ons. This benefit was obtained despite chance performance for recogniz ing the configurations, suggesting that the memory for context was imp licit. The results show how implicit learning and memory of visual con text can guide spatial attention towards task-relevant aspects of a sc ene. (C) 1998 Academic Press.