Statistical learning in visual search: ‘contextual cueing’ reflects the acquisition of an optimal, ‘one-for-all’ oculomotor scanning strategy

Seitz, Werner; Zinchenko, Artyom; Müller, Hermann; Geyer, Thomas · 2023 · Crossref

DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-2561645/v1

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Summary

This study investigates the mechanism behind "contextual cueing," a phenomenon where visual search for a target becomes more efficient when the target appears repeatedly within a stable arrangement of distractors. The standard account posits that observers acquire display-specific long-term memories (templates) that guide attention to the target location upon re-encountering a specific context. In contrast, the authors propose an alternative "procedural-optimization" account, suggesting that contextual facilitation arises from the acquisition of generic, task-general oculomotor scanning strategies. Under this view, repeated displays benefit more from learning simply because they accrue greater weight in optimizing a single, "one-for-all" scanning strategy, rather than through the formation of unique memory templates for each display. To distinguish between these accounts, the authors conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 46 participants performing a visual search task. Participants searched for a target letter "T" among distractor letters "L" in arrays that were either repeated (constant distractor layout) or non-repeated (random distractor layout). The experimental design ensured that all participants viewed the same set of repeated and non-repeated displays to allow for fine-grained comparisons. The study replicated standard measures, such as reaction times (RTs) and fixation counts, but primarily focused on novel scanpath similarity metrics: Dynamic Time Warping, Discrete Fréchet Distance, and Area Between Curves. These metrics quantified the spatio-temporal similarity of fixation sequences both across different participants viewing the same display and within individual participants viewing different displays. The results confirmed standard contextual cueing effects: participants exhibited faster reaction times, fewer fixations, shorter scanpath lengths, and reduced saccade variability for repeated compared to non-repeated displays. Crucially, the scanpath similarity analyses revealed that fixation sequences became increasingly similar over the course of the experiment for both repeated and non-repeated displays. However, scanpaths for repeated displays showed significantly higher similarity than those for non-repeated displays. This pattern held true whether comparing different participants viewing the same display or the same participant viewing different displays. These findings contradict the display-specific template hypothesis, which would predict that scanpaths for different repeated displays should diverge as unique templates are formed. Instead, the data support the procedural-optimization hypothesis, indicating that learning leads to a convergence toward a generic, optimal scanning strategy that is more heavily tuned to frequently encountered displays. The significance of these findings lies in challenging the dominant view that contextual cueing relies on stimulus-specific associative memories. By demonstrating that performance improvements are driven by the proceduralization of task-general visual search operations, the study suggests that training-related improvements in search tasks depend on changes in generic procedural memories rather than unspecific, individual display representations. This implies that the brain optimizes oculomotor scanning strategies globally across a set of displays, with statistical learning weighting frequent contexts more heavily in this optimization process.

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• visual search