The role of meaning in contextual cueing: Evidence from chess expertise

Abstract

In contextual cueing, the position of a search target is learned over repeated exposures to a visual display. The strength of this effect varies across stimulus types. For example, real-world scene contexts give rise to larger search benefits than contexts composed of letters or shapes. We investigated whether such differences in learning can be at least partially explained by the degree of semantic meaning associated with a context independently of the nature of the visual information available (which also varies across stimulus types). Chess boards served as the learning context as their meaningfulness depends on the observer's knowledge of the game. In Experiment 1, boards depicted actual game play, and search benefits for repeated boards were 4 times greater for experts than for novices. In Experiment 2, search benefits among experts were halved when less meaningful randomly generated boards were used. Thus, stimulus meaningfulness independently contributes to learning context–target associations.

Keywords:

• Contextual cueing
• Visual memory
• Chess
• Expertise
• Semantic memory

This research was supported by grants from the University of Edinburgh Development Trust and the Edinburgh Fund to J.R.B. We thank Krista Ehinger and Thomas Wagner for their help generating the stimuli and Gregory Zelinsky, Eyal Reingold, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹In addition, recent research has investigated whether semantically inconsistent objects in scenes initially draw the eyes, with some results suggesting that they do (e.g., Becker, Pashler, & Lubin, 2007; Underwood & Foulsham, 2006) and some suggesting that they do not (e.g., De Graef, Christiaens, & d'Ydewalle, 1990; Gareze & Findlay, 2007; Henderson et al., 1999). Despite this controversy, what is not in dispute is the role of scene context in helping to direct the eyes to locations likely to contain the target of a current search based on the physical and semantic constraints imposed by scene layout.