Rights statement: ©American Psychological Association, 2021. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission. The final article is available, upon publication, at: 10.1037/xhp0000930
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Contextual cuing of visual search does not guide attention automatically in the presence of top-down goals
AU - Luque, David
AU - Beesley, Tom
AU - Molinero, Sara
AU - Vadillo, Miguel A.
N1 - ©American Psychological Association, 2021. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission. The final article is available, upon publication, at: 10.1037/xhp0000930
PY - 2021/8/31
Y1 - 2021/8/31
N2 - Visual search is faster when it occurs within repeated displays, a phenomenon known as contextual cuing (CC). CC has been explained as the result of an automatic orientation of attention towards a target item driven by learned distractor-target associations. In three experiments we tested the specific hypothesis that CC is an automatic process of attentional guidance. Participants first searched for a T target in a standard CC procedure. Then, they experienced the same repeated configurations (with the T still present), but now searched for a Y target that was positioned either in a location on the same, or on a different side, from the old T target. Results suggested that there was no interference caused by the old T-target: target search was not affected by the relative positions of the T and Y. Instead, we found a general facilitation in search times for repeated configurations (Experiments 1 and 2). This main effect disappeared when the need for visual search was eliminated in Experiment 3 using a “feature search task”. These results suggest that repeated sets of distractors did not trigger an uncontrollable response towards the position of the T; instead, CC was produced by perceptual learning processes.
AB - Visual search is faster when it occurs within repeated displays, a phenomenon known as contextual cuing (CC). CC has been explained as the result of an automatic orientation of attention towards a target item driven by learned distractor-target associations. In three experiments we tested the specific hypothesis that CC is an automatic process of attentional guidance. Participants first searched for a T target in a standard CC procedure. Then, they experienced the same repeated configurations (with the T still present), but now searched for a Y target that was positioned either in a location on the same, or on a different side, from the old T target. Results suggested that there was no interference caused by the old T-target: target search was not affected by the relative positions of the T and Y. Instead, we found a general facilitation in search times for repeated configurations (Experiments 1 and 2). This main effect disappeared when the need for visual search was eliminated in Experiment 3 using a “feature search task”. These results suggest that repeated sets of distractors did not trigger an uncontrollable response towards the position of the T; instead, CC was produced by perceptual learning processes.
U2 - 10.1037/xhp0000930
DO - 10.1037/xhp0000930
M3 - Journal article
VL - 47
SP - 1080
EP - 1090
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
SN - 0096-1523
IS - 8
ER -