Cued Attention and Learning of Spatial Context in Children

Cued Attention and Learning of Spatial Context in Children Hanako Yoshida (yoshida@uh.edu) Kevin Darby (kpdarby@uh.edu) Joseph Burling (jmburling@uh.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Houston, 126 Heyne Building Houston, TX 77204-5022 USA Abstract The contextual cuing effect refers to a robust phenomenon in which repeated visual context guides attention to relevant information by constraining search (Brady & Chun, 2007; Chun & Jiang, 1998). The effect is measured by an object search task in which a target (e.g., the letter T) is located within repeated or non-repeated visual contexts (e.g., configurations of the letter L). Shorter response times for the repeated configurations indicate that contextual information has facilitated search. Though the effect is robust among adult participants, recent attempts testing the effect with children yielded mixed results (e.g., Vaidya, Huger, Howard & Howard, 2007). Because contextual cuing could play a critical role in cognitive development, resolving this issue is important. The present study used child friendly paradigms to investigate whether children are sensitive to repeated contextual information. The study suggests that children as young as 3 and half year olds successfully show the contextual cuing effect when visual search tasks are age appropriate. Keywords: Contextual cuing; development of attentional learning; visual search task The Contextual Cuing Effect Selectively attending to relevant information is central to efficient learning, because there are many objects and events competing for attention at any moment (Luck & Vogel, 1997). Attentional mechanisms can help people selectively attend to a specific set of objects and events (Chun & Wolfe, 2001; Kanwisher & Wojciulik, 2000; Pashler, 1998; Treisman & Gelade, 1980) and therefore help organize visual processing and experience. Several factors have been shown to be relevant in organizing adult attention. Results in visual search tasks, for example, suggest that some objects enter attention because they are simply salient in a given scene (Egeth, Jonides, & Wall, 1972; Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Wolfe, 1994; Yantis, 1998), are unique (Bravo & Nakayama, 1992), or relatively novel (Johnston et al., 1990). Other research and models, most relevant to the present study, suggest effects of learning—such as the learning of predictive relations— on attention (Kruschke, 2001; Le Pelley & McLaren, 2003; Mackintosh, 1975; Rescorla & Wagner, 1972). The idea is that cues in the environment provide relevant and irrelevant information, and that learning guides attention to the most relevant cues presented. Though this benficial learning effect has been robustly demonstrated in a number of phenomena with adult participants (Kruschke, 2003; Vidnyanszky & Sohn, 2003), little is known about how early learning interacts with attentional allocation, and further support subsequent learning. The present study directly tests integrated attention in early learning in the context of object search. The present study considers one process known as the contextual cuing effect. The contextual cuing effect is the process of encoding the context surrounding a target, which guides attention toward a target item among distracting stimuli in a visual search task. Sensitivity to such contextual information has been documented in a visual search paradigm, known as the contextual cuing task. In the original contextual cuing paradigm developed by Chun & Jiang (1998), computer-based search displays present adult participants with various configurations of stimuli. Some configurations were repeated across blocks, such that the spatial context of all of the distracters in a display predicted an embedded target location. Half of the configurations were novel and half were repeated throughout the experiment. The task used a T-shaped object as a target and L-shaped objects as distracters surrounding the target. Results indicated that participants found the target faster when configurations of distracters were repeated, indicating that contextual information facilitates search of the target. Along with other learning effects, this effect has been documented robustly and has been tested by a number of research findings. Investigating the development of contextual cuing is important as this pervasive phenomenon in adult search could lead to greater insight into the development of attention and the underlying neural mechanisms of learning and attention more generally.