A configural dominant account of contextual cueing: Configural cues are stronger than colour cues

Abstract

Previous work has shown that reaction times to find a target in displays that have been repeated are faster than those for displays that have never been seen before. This learning effect, termed “contextual cueing” (CC), has been shown using contexts such as the configuration of the distractors in the display and the background colour. However, it is not clear how these two contexts interact to facilitate search. We investigated this here by comparing the strengths of these two cues when they appeared together. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a target that was cued by both colour and distractor configural cues, compared with when the target was only predicted by configural information. The results showed that the addition of a colour cue did not increase contextual cueing. In Experiment 2, participants searched for a target that was cued by both colour and distractor configuration compared with when the target was only cued by colour. The results showed that adding a predictive configural cue led to a stronger CC benefit. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the disruptive effects of removing either a learned colour cue or a learned configural cue and whether there was cue competition when colour and configural cues were presented together. Removing the configural cue was more disruptive to CC than removing colour, and configural learning was shown to overshadow the learning of colour cues. The data support a configural dominant account of CC, where configural cues act as the stronger cue in comparison to colour when they are presented together.

Keywords:

• Contextual cueing
• Configuration
• Colour
• Visual search
• Visual attention

The authors would like to thank James Brockmole for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank Phillippa Harrison and Anna Heinen for their assistance with data collection.

Notes

¹Given that there were 24 repetitions of repeated trials in the test phase, additional learning of the repeated displays could have continued. However, further analysis of both conditions showed that there was no difference in the contextual cueing effect between the first and last halves of the test phase [t(19) = 1.61, p = .12, and t(19) = 1.65, p = .12, for the configural and combined condition, respectively]. This is likely to be because contextual cueing had already reached an asymptotic level (e.g., see also Chun & Jiang, 1998).