Meaning in learning: Contextual cueing relies on objects’ visual features and not on objects’ meaning

Abstract

People easily learn regularities embedded in the environment and utilize them to facilitate visual search. Using images of real-world objects, it has been recently shown that this learning, termed contextual cueing (CC), occurs even in complex, heterogeneous environments, but only when the same distractors are repeated at the same locations. Yet it is not clear what exactly is being learned under these conditions: the visual features of the objects or their meaning. In this study, Experiment 1 demonstrated that meaning is not necessary for this type of learning, as a similar pattern of results was found even when the objects' meaning was largely removed. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that after learning meaningful objects, CC was not diminished by a manipulation that distorted the objects' meaning but preserved most of their visual properties. By contrast, CC was eliminated when the learned objects were replaced with different category exemplars that preserved the objects' meaning but altered their visual properties. Together, these data strongly suggest that the acquired context that facilitates real-world objects search relies primarily on the visual properties and the spatial locations of the objects, but not on their meaning.

Learning “What” and “Where” in Visual Search

“…This conclusion is further supported by the results of the familiarity tests that showed no consistent relationship between familiarity and learning. This observation is in agreement with pervious results that showed CC in the absence of a familiarity effect and vice versa (Makovski, , 2016b). Similarly, here, in all three experiments observers reported that the Repeat displays were more familiar than the New displays, and a between‐experiments comparison found no significant interaction between experiment and display ( F < 1).…”

“…The results of Experiment 1 replicated previous findings showing CC when both the locations and identities of the distractors were preserved during a real-world objects search (Makovski, 2016a(Makovski, , 2016b. The present results further extend these findings in that the effect was generalized to other set-sizes, and particularly to more crowded displays.…”

“…This conclusion seems inconsistent with a study showing learning despite identity or location variability (Endo & Takeda, ). Previous research ruled out several possible explanations for this inconsistency, including methodological differences (e.g., category‐defined targets vs. single exemplar targets; Makovski, ), and the use of meaningful objects (Makovski, ). One might argue that different memory mechanisms (explicit vs. implicit) underlie these two effects.…”

“…Experiment 1 aimed at replicating and extending the finding that the repetition of both "what" and "where" information facilitates search (Makovski, 2016a(Makovski, , 2016b. Unlike previous research that used a fixed set-size of 15 items, here CC was tested in search tasks that involved either 10 or 20 items.…”

“…Importantly, however, learning occurred only when both the identities and the locations of the items were repeated, suggesting that CC might be more specific than typically assumed. Further experiments revealed that the “what” information that is being learned under these conditions is the visual features of the objects and not their abstract, categorical meaning (Makovski, ). Taken together, these findings suggest that the context that facilitates a real‐world‐objects search consists of both the spatial locations and the visual properties of the objects.…”