Effects Of Cue Validity In Contextual Cueing Effect And Its Processing Mechanism

In our daily life,vision system needs to process a mass of visual information at each moment,but the cognitive system has limited capacity to mark all input information processed,so the visual system has to select the task-relevant information from the visual scene and ignore the task-irrelevant information.In 1998,Chun and Jiang discovered that individuals can extract consistent and task-related information from visual scenes and learn the task-relevant information unconsciously,at the same time,individuals could get the behavioral benefit from it.The effect has been referred to as contextual cueing.Since then,many studies have begun to explore the mechanism about how to learn the task-relevant information selectively by using the contextual cueing paradigm.Previous studies have consistently argued that contextual cueing is a powerful and insusceptible visual learning mechanism,it reveals that humans can implicitly learn the valid cue from the visual scene to promote behavioral responses.An important research project in contextual cueing effect is to explore how to extract the context from the visual scene.Past studies have pointed out that the learning ability of contextual cueing effect is quite powerful.Whether it is through changed the ratio between valid information and invalid information or manipulated the similarity between valid information and invalid information,it did not interfere the process of extract the valid cue from a visual scene.Individuals could still extract the valid cues,at the same time,it doesn't interfere the learning effect.These studies are based on the contextual cueing was elicited by the consistent association between the context and the target.In daily life,less of the context is always consistent,that is to say,the context can always be effective prediction targets.Most contexts in life are at a high valid level,and these contexts have a certain probability is invalid.However,the role of context own characteristic in the contextual cueing effect has not been noticed by researchers.This study attempts to introduce the validity of context cueing to the research field of contextual cueing effect,and to verify whether the contextual cueing effect will be affected by different levels of context validity,at the same time,to explore the processing mechanism of context validity in contextual cueing effect.This study includes the following three experiments:Experiment 1 aims to investigate whether the validity of context will influence contextual cueing effect.The experiment defines the validity of context as the ratio of the times of the repeated configuration pair with the fixed target location and the total times of the repeated configuration.When the repeated configuration is invalid,it pairs with the random target location.The experiment adopts the classical experimental paradigm of contextual cueing effect and establishes three levels of validity: 50%,75%,and 100%.It was found that in the 75% validity condition,the individual could learn the association between the repeated configuration and the fixed target location,and the learning effect is equal to the 100% validity condition,indicating that the learning of the context under this condition is not affected.In the 50% validity condition,the behavioral benefit does not appear when the repeated configuration pair with the fixed target location,indicating that the learning of the context in the low validity condition is disturbed.In low-validity condition,individuals may consider the repeated configuration pair with the random target locations as an invalid context,which equals the new configuration,excessive invalid information in experiments results in individuals not being able to extract context from them.Experiment 2 is used to rule out this cause of the absence of contextual cueing effect in low-validity conditions.In Experiment 2,the classic contextual cueing effect paradigm was adopted,but the ratio of the number of repeated configurations to the number of new configurations was 1:3.The results showed that the response of repeated configurations was significantly faster than the response of new configurations,indicating that contextual cueing effect generated under this condition.Thus,too many invalid configurations make it difficult for individuals to extract valid configurations,which should not result in the absence of contextual cueing effect.In Experiment 3,the experiment was divided into a learning phase and an expression phase,and the validity of the context in each phase was manipulated to examine whether the effect of low cues was acting on the learning phase or the expression phase.The experimental design of the learning phase is the same as the 50% validity condition in Experiment 1,and the validity of context was changed to 100% in the expression phase.The results showed that both the learning phase and the expression phase did not show obvious contextual cueing effect,indicating that the low-validity interferes with the individual's learning of the context.Based on the three experiments in this study,we got the following conclusions:(1)The validity of context plays an important role in the contextual cueing effect.The association between the context and the fixed target has been used to induce the contextual cueing effect in high-valid condition,however,contextual cueing effect have been inhibited in low-valid the condition;(2)The low validity of context interfered the learning process of the context,so that the contextual cueing effect has been eliminated under the conditions;(3)The absence of contextual cueing effect under the low cue valid condition is not due to the excessive proportion of invalid context,but because the stable context has a high probability that they can not bring behavior benefit to the individual,so the individual does not learn the context.