The Effect Of Gaze Information Association With The Search Items On Contextual Cueing Effect

When participants were repeatedly exposed to a specific arrangement of target and distractors,the search speed was progressively faster compared to search speed in a novel scene.For example,people would establish the spatial memory about a certain environment and use this memory?the bench stands by the river and the swing is by the bench?to facilitate the search efficiency when they arrive the specific environment later.This phenomenon was called as the contextual cueing effect.Previous research on mechanisms of contextual cueing effect was inconsistent,some researchers proved that the contextual benefit was derived from the attentional guidance whereas others argued that the former theory was not the source of contextual cueing effect.Some researchers found that the direct gaze information is one of many factors that could affect the visual search.The direct gaze could attract attention resource from participants.Thus,we brought gaze information that used pictures of gaze with different orientation as stimuli into traditional contextual cueing effect paradigm to investigate whether the attentional guidance plays a part in this effect.This study was consisted of three experiments:the effect of gaze information is established based on contrast of two conditions:a condition with direct gaze on Target and averted gaze on Distractors(T_directirect D_averted)relative to a baseline control condition(T_avertedD_averted)that the Target and Distractors were both combined with averted gaze in Experiment 1 to investigate whether the influence of direct gaze on attention could affect the contextual cueing effect.Experiment2 maintains the baseline condition whereas changed T_avertedD_averted condition into that the averted gaze was combined with Target and direct gaze combined with Distractors in order to further test the impact of direct gaze on the contextual cueing effect.The gaze pictures are scrambled in Experiment 3 to verify the mechanism of gaze effect on the contextual cueing effect.The study concludes with several conclusions:?1?Effect of gaze interacted with contextual cueing effect,in that direct gaze in target locations led to a greater contextual cueing effect compared to condition with averted gaze on target location.?2?When the direct gaze was combined on distractors,the gaze information also affect contextual cueing effect:contextual cueing effect did not occur when direct gaze were presented on all distractor locations while this effect was still evident when averted gazes were paired with all distractors.?3?Despite the effect of gaze on contextual cueing effect,there was little stare-in-the-crowd effect.?4?The contextual cueing effect facilitated by direct gaze on target is more vulnerable to variation of scene appearance,even though the layout remained the same for Old configurations.