Contextural Cueing Effect Of Visual Search In Real-world Scenes

The complexity of the real-world could not stop people from obtaining all the information needed from the environment in which we live everyday quickly and efficiently. Consequently, what kind of cues human beings use to guide their visual search in the real-world scenes becomes a widely concerned and discussed question in visual cognitive processing research. The contextual cueing effect which was found from previous visual search studies refers to the phenomenon that repeated exposure to a scene leads to a more efficient search for the target on a specific location of the scene for participants. This effect suggests that people could learn the target location- context covariation and further use it to help with their visual search processing. The purpose of the current research was to examine the production mechanism and developmental characteristics of the contextual cueing effect by using visual search paradigm with 3D-rendered illustrations of real-world indoor scenes as experimental materials.This research contains a total of four sub-studies:The first study explored the age difference of the contextual cueing effect of visual search in real-world scenes, includes three experiments. In experiment 1, the difference of the contextual cueing effect between school-age children and college students was examined. In experiment 2, the contextual cueing effect of visual search of older persons in the real-world scenes was explored. In experiment 3, the age difference of attention guidance of the contextual cue in visual search task was explored.The second study explored the influence of semantic information on the contextual cueing effect and the age differences of this influence, includes two experiments. Experiment 4 and experiment 5 investigated the impact of semantic information on the contextual cueing effect of pupils and undergraduates respectively.The third study explored the impact of structural characteristics of scenes on contextual cueing effect and the age difference of this influence, includes two experiments. Experiments 6 and 7 investigated the impact of scene structure on the contextual cueing effect of pupils and undergraduates respectively.The fourth study explored the contextual cueing effects on the basis of global contextual cue and local contextual cue, includes two experiments. Experiment 8 examined the influence of different contextual cues in the visual search of the real-world scenes. Experiment 9 investigated the different contextual cueing effect in participants with different field cognitive styles.Following conclusions were drawn from the findings of the four studies:(1) The contextual cueing effect of visual search in real-world scenes is different in different age groups. It was observed in pupils in grade two and undergraduates although the gain of the contextual cueing effect of pupils grows slowly and requires more learning times. However, the effect is not found in elderly. Pupils in grade two and undergraduates could extract both the semantic information and the structure characteristics information of the context to establish the target location-context covariation. The occurrence of the contextual cueing effect is on the basis of the explicit memory of the target location-context covariation.(2) The contextual cueing effect only occur in the scanning epoch to improve the visual processing in the visual search of real-world scenes, specifically, it could help participants to search with selecting search areas more effectively and orienting attention to the target location more directly. The contextual cueing effect could occur under both the global contextual cue condition and the local contextual cue condition. However, the improvement of the attention guidance from the global contextual cue is greater than it from the local contextual cue, that is to say, the global contextual cue could help participants to select search areas more effectively and orient their attention to the target location more directly.(3) Under the global contextual cue condition, the field cognitive styles have no effect on the visual search performance. However, under the local contextual cue condition, the field independent subjects could not get the contextual cueing effect for the scan frequency and scan pattern ratio during the scanning processing.(4) The contextual cueing guidance model of visual search suggests that individual could extract the contextual information to structure the target location-context covariation, and use the explict memory of the cue to promote the visual progressing of the visual scanning epoch, and the progressing was affected by the age and cognitive factors of the individuals.