The Role Of The Local Information In Spatial Situation Prompt

Invariant spatial configuration of the visual environment can guide observer’sattention to specific target’s location and facilitates recognition of the target in it,which is called spatial contextual cueing effect. That is, when observers search for thetarget among heterogeneously distractors, if the configuration of distractors isrepeated across many trials, and consistently paired with a target location (oldcondition), response times are faster than when the distractor and target locations arerandomized (new condition). Previous research about the mechanism of the spatialcontextual cueing effect has shown that this form of search facilitation benefits fromtwo aspects. For one thing, this effect increases the efficiency of search by guiding thedeployment of visual attention toward target locations; for another thing, it facilitatesobservers’ late motor response selection and execution (Zhao, Liu, Jiao, Zhou, Li&Sun,2012; Schankin&Schub,2009). Form the attentional guidance angle, someresearchers have examined what do the different spatial regions of the repeated searchcontext (global regions、local regions and non-local regions) play the role in theeffect. Unfortunately, most of these studies only centred on exploring the role of thelocal regions in which the target appears. So, in the present study, we sought to testwhether there is also some statistical information in the non-local region that can beused to cue the location of the target.This study contained3experiments. Each experiment was conducted in twophases: training (20blocks) and test (8blocks). During the training trials, observerswere exposed only to16global-predictive configurations, so that spatial contextualcueing can occur. That is, a single factor within subject design was conducted in thephase of training. While, in the phase of test, the experimental designs were differentaccording to the goals of the experiments. The specific experimental designs were asfollows. Firstly, using classic contextual cueing paradigm, experiment1compared theamount of the contextual cueing effect, which benefited from the repetition of thelocal information and the global information respectively; A3(configuration:nonpredictive、quadrant predictive、global predictive)×8(block:1-20) within subject design was conducted, so that we can speculate whether information from the othercontext (non-local information) except for the local context can facilitate visual search.In contrast to past studies, in experiment2, we probed the role of the statisticalinformation of non-local regions in facilitating target localization directly. A2(configuration: nonpredictive、non-local predictive)×8(block:1-8) within subjectdesign was conducted. Then, in order to address some alternative possibilities of theresult of experiment2, in a similar vein, experiment3was conducted with a2(configuration: nonpredictive、new non-local predictive)×8(block:1-8) withinsubject design.Results of the three experiments indicated that:1A spatial contextual cueing effect can be obtained from quadrant predictiveinformation (local predictive). But comparing with the spatial contextual cueingeffect generated from global repetition, the amount of contextual cueing is smaller inthis condition.2Observers demonstrate spatial contextual cueing effect in the non-local predictivecondition, indicating that statistical predictive information in the non-local regionscan also facilitate observers’ targets localization.3There isn’t statistical information in the non-local regions (precisely, the twoquadrants adjacent to the target quadrant) that belongs to the local regions inexperiment2.