Zinchenko Artyom, Busch Nuno, Dodwell Gordon, Geyer Thomas
Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany.
School of Management, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany.
Psychophysiology. 2025 Jul;62(7):e70108. doi: 10.1111/psyp.70108.
Humans can learn to use repeated spatial arrangements of irrelevant, non-target items to direct the focus of attention towards behaviorally relevant-target-items, a phenomenon known as contextual cueing (CC). However, whether CC is itself dependent on attentional resources is a controversial issue. Here, we used visual search to test how CC is affected when attention varies through two types of manipulations: perceptual load (as induced by target-distractor similarity) and postural load (sitting vs. standing). For easy searches (low target-distractor similarity), we observed reliable facilitation of search in repeated-context displays, which was independent of participants' body posture. For difficult searches (high target-distractor similarity), contextual facilitation was evident only with standing posture. Posture-related benefits remained significant even after controlling for heart rate variability (HRV), body mass index, and physical activity. Decomposing aggregated reaction times by drift-diffusion modeling revealed that CC in difficult searches decreased the amount of evidence required for target-response decisions. Our results suggest that statistical learning is effectively supplemented during standing posture when visual search is challenging, possibly because posture manipulation and contextual manipulation affect common response-selection stages of processing.
人类能够学会利用无关的、非目标项目的重复空间排列，将注意力焦点引向行为上相关的目标项目，这一现象被称为情境线索化（CC）。然而，CC本身是否依赖于注意力资源是一个有争议的问题。在此，我们使用视觉搜索来测试当注意力通过两种类型的操作发生变化时CC是如何受到影响的：知觉负载（由目标-干扰项相似性诱导）和姿势负载（坐着与站着）。对于简单搜索（低目标-干扰项相似性），我们在重复情境显示中观察到了可靠的搜索促进作用，这与参与者的身体姿势无关。对于困难搜索（高目标-干扰项相似性），情境促进作用仅在站立姿势下明显。即使在控制了心率变异性（HRV）、体重指数和身体活动之后，与姿势相关的益处仍然显著。通过漂移扩散模型分解总反应时间表明，困难搜索中的CC减少了目标反应决策所需的证据量。我们的结果表明，当视觉搜索具有挑战性时，站立姿势期间统计学习得到有效补充，这可能是因为姿势操作和情境操作影响了共同的反应选择处理阶段。
