The Time Course of Attentional Guidance in Contextual Cueing

Contextual cueing experiments show that targets in heterogeneous displays are detected faster with time when displays are repeated, even when observers are not aware of the repetition. Most researchers agree that the learned context guides attention to the target location and thus speeds subsequent target processing. Because in previous experiments one target location was uniquely associated with exactly one configuration, the context was highly predictive. In two experiments, the predictive value of the context was investigated by varying the number of possible target locations. We could show that even when the context was less predictive, it was learned and used to guide visual-spatial attention. However, the time course of learning differed significantly: learning was faster when the number of target locations was reduced. These results suggest that not an association of context and target is learned but that rather the precision of the attention shift improves.