Does Target Template Matching Benefit from Repeated Contexts in Visual Search?

Visual search can be facilitated by learning the spatial layouts of search items in repeatedly encountered displays (contextual cuing), thereby improving attentional guidance to the target. The current study investigated whether contextual cuing not only benefits attentional guidance but may also facilitate the identification of the target item (i.e., its comparison with a target template stored in memory) once attention is located on the to-be-detected target. To test this idea, our study systematically varied the difficulty of target template matching by presenting targets with different orientations such that they are more difficult versus easier to match with a template. The results from Experiment 1 revealed a reliable contextual cuing effect, but no evidence for a difference in cuing across the easy and difficult matching conditions. However, this lack of a difference may have resulted from opposing tendencies between search efficiency and template matching difficulty, which were evident in additional pretests. These opposing patterns may thus preclude a potential difference in the cuing effects. Experiment 2 then changed the search displays to remedy these opposing tendencies. While search and template matching now indeed revealed consistent effects, contextual cuing was again reliable but still not different across the matching conditions. Our results thus show that target template matching is not facilitated by statistical learning of contextual regularities. Instead, contextual cuing seems to primarily benefit the initial guidance of attention, but it does not reveal an effect upon post-selective processing.