Contextual cueing effect

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In psychology, contextual cueing refers to a form of visual search facilitation which describe targets appearing in repeated configurations are detected more quickly. The contextual cueing effect is a learning phenomenon where repeated exposure to a specific arrangement of target and distractor items leads to progressively more efficient search. [1]

Visual search is a type of perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the visual environment for a particular object or feature among other objects or features. Visual search can take place with or without eye movements. The ability to consciously locate an object or target amongst a complex array of stimuli has been extensively studied over the past 40 years. Practical examples of using visual search can be seen in everyday life, such as when one is picking out a product on a supermarket shelf, when animals are searching for food amongst piles of leaves, when trying to find your friend in a large crowd of people, or simply when playing visual search games such as Where's Wally? Much previous literature on visual search used reaction time in order to measure the time it takes to detect the target amongst its distractors. An example of this could be a green square amongst a set of red circles. However, reaction time measurements do not always distinguish between the role of attention and other factors: a long reaction time might be the result of difficulty directing attention to the target, or slowed decision-making processes or slowed motor responses after attention is already directed to the target and the target has already been detected. Many visual search paradigms have therefore used eye movement as a means to measure the degree of attention given to stimuli. However, vast research to date suggests that eye movements can move independently of attention, and therefore eye movement measures do not completely capture the role of attention.

Contents

Theoretical Background

In a global context, massive amounts of sensory input are received on a daily basis that would require an unrealistic amount of cognitive resources for it all to be processed. The concept of contextual cueing is that the brain has developed sophisticated mechanisms that aid us to subconsciously encode invariant visual information for the purpose of saving cognitive resources. [2] [3] Contextual information thereby becomes relevant because it embodies these fundamental unchanging properties of the visual environment such as stable spatial layout information – surroundings you see that do not vary in appearance and location over time. [4]

In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the effort being used in the working memory. Cognitive load theory differentiates cognitive load into three types: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane.

Sensory processing is the process that organizes sensation from one’s own body and the environment, thus making it possible to use the body effectively within the environment. Specifically, it deals with how the brain processes multiple sensory modality inputs, such as proprioception, vision, auditory system, tactile, olfactory, vestibular system, interoception, and taste into usable functional outputs.

As an everyday example, imagine a situation in which one searches for a car in a parking lot. Different search strategies can be adopted depending on whether one searches for a car in a global scene context (e.g., searching on the west side of the parking lot) or in a local configural context (e.g., searching for a car parked between two yellow cars). Cognitive resources can thus be saved by scoping attention to specific contexts – how and where it should be deployed. Contextual cueing takes advantage of this by intrinsic learning of static spatial layouts and maps them into memory representations that expedites search. Memory representations can be viewed as associations between spatial configurations (context) and target locations. Sensitivity to these invariant regularities presented in visual context serves to guide visual attention, object recognition and action.

Attention behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether deemed subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information

Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether deemed subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. It is a state of arousal. It is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seem several simultaneous objects or trains of thought. Focalization, the concentration of consciousness, is of its essence. Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources.

Researches of contextual cueing tasks are additionally helpful in understanding the neural substrates of implicit learning. For example, amnesic patients with hippocampal damage are impaired in their learning of novel contextual information, even though learning in the contextual cueing task does not appear to rely on conscious retrieval of contextual memory traces. Chun (2000) pointed the neural circuitries within the hippocampus and associated medial temporal lobe structures as likely candidates for encoding contextual information in the brain, independent of awareness. [4]

Awareness is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events. More broadly, it is the state of being conscious of something. Another definition describes it as a state wherein a subject is aware of some information when that information is directly available to bring to bear in the direction of a wide range of behavioral processes. The concept is often synonymous to consciousness and is also understood as being consciousness itself.

Theory development

Early studies

The standard contextual-cueing task first developed by Chun and Jiang in 1998 pioneered research in the development of this area of study. The results showed how, in global contexts, implicit learning and memory of visual context can navigate spatial attention towards task-relevant aspects of a scene. [5]

Implicit learning is the learning of complex information in an incidental manner, without awareness of what has been learned. According to Frensch and Rünger (2003) the general definition of implicit learning is still subject to some controversy, although the topic has had some significant developments since the 1960s. Implicit learning may require a certain minimal amount of attention and may depend on attentional and working memory mechanisms. The result of implicit learning is implicit knowledge in the form of abstract representations rather than verbatim or aggregate representations, and scholars have drawn similarities between implicit learning and implicit memory.

General paradigm

Example of a contextual cueing effect paradigm (Vadillo et al., 2015) Contextual cueing example.png
Example of a contextual cueing effect paradigm (Vadillo et al., 2015)

In their experiment, participants searched for a ‘T’-shaped target amongst ‘L’-shaped distractors. Unbeknownst to participants, the search arrays can be bisected. Search trials were divided into multiple blocks. Within each block, half of the search displays presented novel item arrangements. In those ‘new’ displays, the target and distractors changed locations randomly across trials to serve as a control baseline. The other half of the search displays were repeatedly presented between blocks of trials. That is, ‘old’ displays, in which the locations of both the target and the distractors were kept constant. Essentially, old displays are fixed in their position. Sensitivity to global configurations should lead to faster target search performance in repeated (old) configurations compared to baseline (new) configurations that were newly generated for each block if contextual information was learned.

In the statistical theory of the design of experiments, blocking is the arranging of experimental units in groups (blocks) that are similar to one another.

A control variable in scientific experimentation is an experimental element which is constant and unchanged throughout the course of the investigation. Control variables could strongly influences experimental results, were they not held constant during the experiment in order to test the relative relationship of the dependent and independent variables. The control variables themselves are not of primary interest to the experimenter.

Stimulus (physiology) stimulus is a detectable change in the internal or external environment (physiology)

In physiology, a stimulus is a detectable change in the internal or external environment. The ability of an organism or organ to respond to external stimuli is called sensitivity. When a stimulus is applied to a sensory receptor, it normally elicits or influences a reflex via stimulus transduction. These sensory receptors can receive information from outside the body, as in touch receptors found in the skin or light receptors in the eye, as well as from inside the body, as in chemoreceptors and mechanoreceptors. An internal stimulus is often the first component of a homeostatic control system. External stimuli are capable of producing systemic responses throughout the body, as in the fight-or-flight response. In order for a stimulus to be detected with high probability, its level must exceed the absolute threshold; if a signal does reach threshold, the information is transmitted to the central nervous system (CNS), where it is integrated and a decision on how to react is made. Although stimuli commonly cause the body to respond, it is the CNS that finally determines whether a signal causes a reaction or not.

The main finding was that reaction times (RTs) were faster to targets appearing in old compared to new spatial arrangements. Their results demonstrated that a robust memory for visual context exists to guide spatial attention. This newly discovered form of search facilitation spawned the term ‘contextual cueing’. Chun and Jiang argued that it is a result of incidentally learned associations between spatial configurations (context) and target locations.

In a recognition test at the end of the experiment, participants were typically unable to distinguish old and new displays to a level better than chance. Improved search performance was obtained despite chance recognition for the configurations, suggesting that the memory for context was implicit. Recently, the role of consciousness in contextual cueing has become a controversial topic (for a review, see [6] ). Since its inception, the contextual cueing paradigm has proven to be a well-established tool in the investigation of visual search.

Recent studies

The contextual cueing effect at least partially account for why expertise has been demonstrated to affect performance on a wide range of visually based tasks.

A study conducted by Brockmole et al. (2008) showed implications of why chess experts are more able to recite a game of chess. In their 2-part experiment, chess boards served as the apparatus for learning context as their meaningfulness is dependent on the observer’s knowledge of the game. [7]

In their first experiment, the chess boards depicted actual game play, and search benefits for repeated boards were four times greater for experts than for novices. In the second experiment, search benefits among experts were halved when less meaningful randomly generated boards were used. Thus, stimulus meaningfulness independently contributes to learning context – chess piece associations.

One general mechanism that may underlie this expertise effect is an enhanced ability to use semantic information over and above strictly visual information to predict the locations of a display’s task-relevant content. Nevertheless, experts were apt to learn the association between an arbitrarily located target and an array of randomly selected and positioned playing pieces; approximately half of the rate of learning and resulting learning benefit was retained compared to a situation where board layouts reflected actual game-play. On this basis, this difference seems to be, at least in part, a reflection of the degree of contextual information contained in those displays.

Likewise, tennis and cricket experts are better able to anticipate the movement of balls following serves and pitches. [8] [9] Hockey experts fixate tactically critical areas more rapidly when making defensive strategy decisions in real time. [10] Gymnastics experts make fewer and longer fixations when searching for performance errors. [11] Reliable effects of search time facilitation were also found in a younger cohort of 8–12 year old participants, further suggesting the inherent aspect of the contextual cue effect. [12]

Similar research has displayed the same result as far back as in the 1970s by Chase and Simon (1973). [13] [14] However, ideas of the contextual cueing effect were not materialized until Chun and Jiang’s seminal study in 1998. [1]

Underlying mechanism

Equivocal explanations for contextual cueing have been discussed in this literature. At the moment, a definitive elucidation for the underlying mechanisms has yet to be concluded.

In contextual cueing, distractor and target items are accompanied by various features. Some examples of the items' features would be the relative hue, size and shape. An item is said to be more salient if it stands out from the rest in these features (the odd-one-out). Studies have been conducted to examine whether the contextual cueing effect would be accentuated when the targets are more salient; evidence on the influence is undecided. Geyer et al. (2010) conducted experiments which required search for a single target that differed significantly in colour compared to the rest of the items. [15] It was found repeated, relative to novel arrangements of items led to an improvement in detection accuracy and RTs. Thus, they argued when finding salient targets, contextual cueing can improve search. On the contrary, Conci et al. (2011) manipulated the relative size of all distractors compared to the target stimulus. [16] Their results demonstrated reduced effects of contextual cueing when the size of the distractors is different compared to the control condition in which all items were of the same size, thereby counteracting the previous results posed by Geyer et al. (2010).

Current literature on how contextual cueing occur is also rather mixed. One view is that contextual cueing is determined by proximity; this was found evident by results that exclusively display items in the vicinity of the target are acquired in contextual learning. [17] [18] This view proposed the contextual cueing effect operates when attention is scoped on a molecular level. By contrast, other studies suggested that observers form associations between the target and the entire distractor background. [19] [20] [21] These findings indicate it is the global context that is necessary for the contextual cueing effect to function.

Some described contextual cueing effect as a case of spatial congruency bias – a phenomenon where two separately presented items are deemed more similar to each other if they were shown in the same location. Research has shown even just subtle differences in the location of objects can drastically alter the subject’s perception of the display’s similarity. [22] Specifically, in the contextual cue paradigm, targets in old displays are thereby associated with greater similarity compared to new displays due to all the items being in identical location. As a result, identifying similar targets will enable faster memory encoding and strengthen memory retrieval.

See also

Related Research Articles

Long-term memory (LTM) is the stage of the Atkinson–Shiffrin memory model where informative knowledge is held indefinitely. It is defined in contrast to short-term and working memory, which persist for only about 18 to 30 seconds. Long-term memory is commonly labelled as explicit memory (declarative), as well as episodic memory, semantic memory, autobiographical memory, and implicit memory.

Short-term memory is the capacity for holding, but not manipulating, a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time. For example, short-term memory can be used to remember a phone number that has just been recited. The duration of short-term memory is believed to be in the order of seconds. The most commonly cited capacity is The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, despite the fact that Miller himself stated that the figure was intended as "little more than a joke" and that Cowan (2001) provided evidence that a more realistic figure is 4±1 units. In contrast, long-term memory can hold the information indefinitely.

Cognition is "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.

The Atkinson–Shiffrin model is a model of memory proposed in 1968 by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin. The model asserts that human memory has three separate components:

  1. a sensory register, where sensory information enters memory,
  2. a short-term store, also called working memory or short-term memory, which receives and holds input from both the sensory register and the long-term store, and
  3. a long-term store, where information which has been rehearsed in the short-term store is held indefinitely.
Spatial memory

In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, spatial memory is that part of the memory responsible for the recording of information about one's environment and spatial orientation. For example, a person's spatial memory is required in order to navigate around a familiar city, just as a rat's spatial memory is needed to learn the location of food at the end of a maze. It is often argued that in both humans and animals, spatial memories are summarized as a cognitive map. Spatial memory has representations within working, short-term memory and long-term memory. Research indicates that there are specific areas of the brain associated with spatial memory. Many methods are used for measuring spatial memory in children, adults, and animals.

The spacing effect is the phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of content in a single session. That is, it is better to use spaced presentation rather than massed presentation. Practically, this effect suggests that "cramming" the night before an exam is not likely to be as effective as studying at intervals in a longer time frame. It is important to note, however, that the benefit of spaced presentations does not appear at short retention intervals, in which massed presentations tend to lead to better memory performance. This effect is a desirable difficulty; it challenges the learner but leads to better learning in the long-run.

Serial-position effect

Serial-position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst. The term was coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus through studies he performed on himself, and refers to the finding that recall accuracy varies as a function of an item's position within a study list. When asked to recall a list of items in any order, people tend to begin recall with the end of the list, recalling those items best. Among earlier list items, the first few items are recalled more frequently than the middle items.

Rapid serial visual presentation is an experimental model frequently used to examine the temporal characteristics of attention. The RSVP paradigm requires participants to look at a continuous presentation of visual items which is around 10 items per second. They are all shown in the same place. The targets are placed inside this stream of continuous items. They are separate from the rest of the items known as distracters. The distracters can either be a color change or it can be letters that are among the numbers.

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to an orientation mechanism that briefly enhances the speed and accuracy with which an object is detected after the object is attended, but then impairs detection speed and accuracy. IOR is usually measured with a cue-response paradigm, in which a person presses a button when he or she detects a target stimulus following the presentation of a cue that indicates the location in which the target will appear. The cue can be exogenous, or endogenous. Inhibition of return results from oculomotor activation, regardless of whether it was produced by exogenous signals or endougenously. Although IOR occurs for both visual and auditory stimuli, IOR is greater for visual stimuli, and is studied more often than auditory stimuli.

Memory is the process of storing and recalling information that was previously acquired. Memory occurs through three fundamental stages: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Storing refers to the process of placing newly acquired information into memory, which is modified in the brain for easier storage. Encoding this information makes the process of retrieval easier for the brain where it can be recalled and brought into conscious thinking. Modern memory psychology differentiates between the two distinct types of memory storage: short-term memory and long-term memory. Several models of memory have been proposed over the past century, some of them suggesting different relationships between short- and long-term memory to account for different ways of storing memory.

In psychology, context-dependent memory is the improved recall of specific episodes or information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same. One particularly common example of context-dependence at work occurs when an individual has lost an item in an unknown location. Typically, people try to systematically "retrace their steps" to determine all of the possible places where the item might be located. Based on the role that context plays in determining recall, it is not at all surprising that individuals often quite easily discover the lost item upon returning to the correct context. This concept is heavily related to the encoding specificity principle.

Emotion can have a powerful effect on humans and animals. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events.

Perceptual learning is learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise as in reading, seeing relations among chess pieces, knowing whether or not an X-ray image shows a tumor.

N2pc refers to an ERP component linked to selective attention. The N2pc appears over visual cortex contralateral to the location in space to which subjects are attending; if subjects pay attention to the left side of the visual field, the N2pc appears in the right hemisphere of the brain, and vice versa. This characteristic makes it a useful tool for directly measuring the general direction of a person's attention with fine-grained temporal resolution.

Object-based attention refers to the relationship between an ‘object’ representation and a person’s visually stimulated, selective attention, as opposed to a relationship involving either a spatial or a feature representation; although these types of selective attention are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Research into object-based attention suggests that attention improves the quality of the sensory representation of a selected object, and results in the enhanced processing of that object’s features.

In cognitive psychology, intertrial priming is an accumulation of the priming effect over multiple trials, where "priming" is the effect of the exposure to one stimulus on subsequently presented stimuli. Intertrial priming occurs when a target feature is repeated from one trial to the next, and typically results in speeded response times to the target. A target is the stimulus participants are required to search for. For example, intertrial priming occurs when the task is to respond to either a red or a green target, and the response time to a red target is faster if the preceding trial also has a red target.

Visual spatial attention is a form of visual attention that involves directing attention to a location in space. Similar to its temporal counterpart visual temporal attention, these attention modules have been widely implemented in video analytics in computer vision to provide enhanced performance and human interpretable explanation of deep learning models.

Visual selective attention is a brain function that controls the processing of retinal input based on whether it is relevant or important. It selects particular representations to enter perceptual awareness and therefore guide behaviour. Through this process, less relevant information is suppressed.

References

  1. 1 2 Chun, M. M., & Jiang, Y. (1998). Contextual cueing: Implicit learning and memory of visual context guides spatial attention. Cognitive Psychology, 36, 28-71
  2. ↑ Treisman, A. M., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97–136
  3. ↑ Wolfe, J. M. (2003). Moving towards solutions to some enduring controversies in visual search. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 70–76.
  4. 1 2 Chun, M. M., (2000). Contextual cueing of visual attention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(5), 170–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01476-5
  5. ↑ Chun, M. M., & Jiang, Y. (1998). Contextual cueing: implicit learning and memory of visual context guides spatial attention. Cognitive Psychology, 36(1), 28–71. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1998.0681
  6. 1 2 Vadillo, M. A., Konstantinidis, E., & Shanks, D. R. (2015). Underpowered samples, false negatives, and unconscious learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(1), 87–102. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0892-6
  7. ↑ Brockmole, J. R., Hambrick, D. Z., Windisch, D. J., & Henderson, J. M. (2008). The role of meaning in contextual cueing: Evidence from chess expertise. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61(12), 1886–1896. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470210701781155
  8. ↑ Goulet, C., Bard, C., & Fleury, M. (1989). Expertise differences in preparing to return a tennis serve: A visual information processing approach. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 11, 382– 398.
  9. ↑ Land, M. F., & McLeod, P. (2000). From eye movements to actions: How batsmen hit the ball. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 1340– 1345.
  10. ↑ Martell, S. G., & Vickers, J. N. (2004). Gaze characteristics of elite and near-elite athletesinice hockey defensive tactics. Human Movement Science, 22, 689–712
  11. ↑ Moreno, F. J., Reina, R., Luis, V., & Sabido, R. (2002). Visual search strategies in experienced and inexperienced gymnastic coaches. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 95, 901– 902.
  12. ↑ Darby, K., Burling, J., & Yoshida, H. (2014). The Role of Search Speed in the Contextual Cueing of Children’s Attention. Cognitive Development, 29, 17–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2013.10.001
  13. ↑ Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973a). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 55 – 81.
  14. ↑ Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973b). The mind’s eye in chess. In W. G. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing. New York: Academic Press.
  15. ↑ Geyer, T., Zehetleitner, M., & Müller, H. J. (2010). Contextual cueing of pop-out visual search: When context guides the deployment of attention. Journal of Vision, 10(5), 20–20. https://doi.org/10.1167/10.5.20
  16. ↑ Conci, M., Sun, L., & Müller, H. J. (2011). Contextual remapping in visual search after predictable target-location changes. Psychological Research, 75(4), 279–289. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-010-0306-3
  17. ↑ Olson, I. R., & Chun, M. M. (2002). Perceptual constraints on implicit learning of spatial context. Visual Cognition, 9(3), 273–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506280042000162
  18. ↑ Brady, T. F., & Chun, M. M. (2007). Spatial constraints on learning in visual search: modeling contextual cuing. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 33(4), 798–815. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.33.4.798
  19. ↑ Brockmole, J. R., Castelhano, M. S., & Henderson, J. M. (2006). Contextual cueing in naturalistic scenes: Global and local contexts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(4), 699–706. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.32.4.699
  20. ↑ Kunar, M. A., Flusberg, S. J., & Wolfe, J. M. (2006). Contextual cuing by global features. Perception & Psychophysics, 68(7), 1204–1216. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193721
  21. ↑ Shi, Z., Zang, X., Jia, L., Geyer, T., & Müller, H. J. (2013). Transfer of contextual cueing in full-icon display remapping. Journal of Vision, 13(3). https://doi.org/10.1167/13.3.2
  22. ↑ Golomb, J. D., Kupitz, C. N., & Thiemann, C. T. (2014). The influence of object location on identity: a ‘spatial congruency bias’. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 143(6), 2262–2278. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000017
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