The effect of practice on location cueing and visual search

Location cueing can facilitate response times when target-detection tasks a re performed. A target-detection experiment was conducted with inexperience d participants to determine whether or not the magnitude of facilitative lo cation cueing effects would change as a function of practice. Over the cour se of five test sessions, these effects attenuated. This suggests that prac tice decreases the influence of location cues on visual search performance and attentional processing. We propose that when participants perform cued visual search experiments and become familiar with potential target locatio ns as a result of extended practice and automaticity, these locations are e ncoded in spatial memory by an operation called spatial indexing.