van Asselen, M. , Rodrigues, A. . & Castelo-Branco, M.
IBILI, Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra
Implicit contextual cueing is a learning mechanism in which visual information from our environment is memorized in order to facilitate visual search. In the current study we investigate how different types of contextual information presented simultaneously can facilitate visual search. It is known that both spatial and object cues can facilitate visual search, but it remains unclear how two different types of cues presented together can do so. Therefore, we tested 20 healthy young adults with a contextual cueing task including object identity and spatial configuration as cues. We found that when both cues are used, the contextual cueing effect is much larger than when only a single cue is used. Furthermore, a larger effect was found for spatial cues than for object cues. Finally, eye movement data that was recorded during the contextual cueing task confirm previous studies showing that spatial based contextual cueing is associated with a reduction in the number of fixations that are made (Peterson & Kramer, 2001; Tseng and Li, 2004), whereas object based cueing is associated with shorter fixation durations (Van Asselen, 2010).