Sources of Search Facilitation in Contextual Cueing

Visual search can be facilitated by memory of repeated search contexts, referred to as contextual cueing. This effect is found for both simple stimulus arrays and real-world/naturalistic scenes. Studies have combined simple arrays and real-world/naturalistic scenes to better understand their contribution to the contextual cueing effect when both are available to facilitate search. Results are mixed across these studies, which may be due to degree of integration of the simplistic array and the naturalistic scene biasing toward either the array or the scene. Understanding this integration is crucial for real-world search, as our visual environment often consists of both isolated arrays (e.g., objects on opaque shelving in a store) and arrays laid within scenes (e.g., searching through the store itself). We examined the contributions of the array and the scene to contextual cueing when the array was more or less integrated with the scene. In Experiment 1, when the scene was separated from the array, appearing only as a border around the array, no contextual cueing effect was found for the repeated scene, array, or scene and array condition. Between-group linear model comparisons showed no difference in size of the contextual cueing effect for the repeated array and repeated scene and array condition, while both showed a larger effect than the repeated scene condition. In Experiment 2, when the scene was continuous behind the array with each search item placed on the array individually, a contextual cueing effect was found for all between-group conditions. Additional between-group comparisons showed no significant differences in the contextual cueing effect between any of the repeated conditions. These findings provide insight into the role of integration on scene and array facilitation of the contextual cueing effect, which has implications for understanding how we navigate and search in complex real-world environments.