Cognitive Neuroscience of Perception and Action, Department of Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany.
J Vis. 2021 Sep 1;21(10):9. doi: 10.1167/jov.21.10.9.
In contextual cueing tasks, participants can use a repeating local context to learn to detect the target, yet most contextual cueing studies have relied on repeating global context properties. We examined whether observers can use local context repetitions in a similar manner as they use global context repetitions. In addition, we examined how reward-predicting context features modulate the use of local and global contexts. Participants searched through contexts in which either the entire context configuration or only a local context around the target repeated, intermixed with novel contexts. Half of the context items appeared in a color signaling either low or high reward. We found that local context repetitions led to comparable benefits in response times and fixation count as global context repetitions did. Surprisingly, reward magnitude did not affect performance in local nor in global contexts. The results suggest that a local chunk of distractors can be used for context learning and attention guidance in a similar manner as the global context configuration. We suggest that the proportion of repeated and novel context trials is crucial for context learning and that our combination of locally and globally repeating contexts provided an environment that facilitated learning in both context types because it allowed predicting the target location from the context in most of the trials.
在语境线索任务中，参与者可以使用重复的局部语境来学习检测目标，但大多数语境线索研究依赖于重复的全局语境属性。我们研究了观察者是否可以以类似的方式使用局部语境重复，就像他们使用全局语境重复一样。此外，我们还研究了奖励预测语境特征如何调节局部和全局语境的使用。参与者在其中搜索了两种语境，一种是整个语境配置重复，另一种是仅目标周围的局部语境重复，与新语境混合。一半的语境项目出现在一种颜色中，表示低或高奖励。我们发现，局部语境重复在反应时间和注视次数上与全局语境重复一样带来了相当大的好处。令人惊讶的是，奖励幅度对局部和全局语境中的表现都没有影响。结果表明，干扰物的局部块可以以类似的方式用于上下文学习和注意力引导，就像全局上下文配置一样。我们认为，重复和新颖语境试验的比例对于上下文学习至关重要，我们的局部和全局重复语境的组合提供了一个环境，因为它允许在大多数试验中从语境中预测目标位置，从而促进了两种语境类型的学习。
