Awareness in contextual cueing of visual search as measured with concurrent access- and phenomenal-consciousness tasks.
Journal of vision October 25, 2012 Bernhard Schlagbauer, Hermann J Müller, Michael Zehetleitner et al. 38 citations
In visual search, people find targets faster when the arrangement of items repeats across trials, a phenomenon known as contextual cueing. This study investigated whether the knowledge gained from repeated displays is conscious. After a training phase, participants briefly viewed search displays followed by masks and then indicated the target's location and their confidence. Results showed that contextual cueing was driven by only about four learned configurations. For those learned displays, localization accuracy was higher, and participants reported greater visual experience and confidence compared to novel displays. The findings suggest that contextual cueing relies on a small number of repeated displays, and the ability to locate the target in those displays is accompanied by increased conscious awareness.