AUTHOR=Zheng Lei , Marek Nico , Melnik Natalia , Pollmann Stefan TITLE=Contextual cueing—Eye movements in rotated and recombined displays JOURNAL=Frontiers in Cognition VOLUME=3 YEAR=2024 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cognition/articles/10.3389/fcogn.2024.1403749 DOI=10.3389/fcogn.2024.1403749 ISSN=2813-4532 ABSTRACT=

Contextual cueing leads to improved efficiency in visual search resulting from the extraction of spatial regularities in repeated visual stimuli. Previous research has demonstrated the independent contributions of global configuration and spatial position to contextual cueing. The present study aimed to investigate whether learned spatial configuration or individual locations would elicit fixation patterns resembling those observed in the original displays. We found that search guidance based on either local or global spatial context, by combining distractor locations from two learned displays or rotating displays, kept not only search time facilitation intact, in agreement with previous studies, but also enabled search with less fixations and more direct scan paths to the target. Fixation distribution maps of recombined or rotated displays were more similar to the original displays than random new displays. However, for rotated displays this was only true when the rotation angle was taken into account. Overall, this shows an astonishingly flexible use of the oculomotor system for search in incompletely repeated displays.