The impact of distracter–target similarity on contextual cueing effects of children and adults

Invariant contexts reduce response time variability in visual search in an age-specific way: A comparison of children, teenagers, and adults

Contextual cueing is a phenomenon in which repeatedly encountered arrays of items can enhance the visual search for a target item. This is widely attributed to attentional guidance driven by contextual memory acquired during visual search. Some studies suggest that children may have an immature ability to use contextual cues compared to adults, while others argue that contextual learning capacity is similar across ages. To test the development of context-guided attention, this study compared contextual cueing effects among three age groups: adults (aged 18-33 years, N = 32), teenagers (aged 15-17 years, N = 41), and younger children (aged 8-9 years, N = 43). Moreover, this study introduced a measure of response time variability that tracks fluctuations in response time throughout the experiment, in addition to the conventional analysis of response times. The results showed that all age groups demonstrated significantly faster responses in repeated than non-repeated search contexts. Notably, adults and teenagers exhibited smaller response time variability in repeated contexts than in non-repeated ones, while younger children did not. This implies that children are less efficient at consolidating contextual information into a stable memory representation, which may lead to less stable attentional guidance during visual search.

Playing hide and seek: Contextual regularity learning develops between 3 and 5 years of age

The ability to acquire contextual regularities is fundamental in everyday life because it helps us to navigate the environment, directing our attention where relevant events are more likely to occur. Sensitivity to spatial regularities has been largely reported from infancy. Nevertheless, it is currently unclear when children can use this rapidly acquired contextual knowledge to guide their behavior. Evidence of this ability is indeed mixed in school-aged children and, to date, it has never been explored in younger children and toddlers. The current study investigated the development of contextual regularity learning in children aged 3 to 5 years. To this aim, we designed a new contextual learning paradigm in which young children were presented with recurring configurations of bushes and were asked to guess behind which bush a cartoon monkey was hiding. In a series of two experiments, we manipulated the relevance of color and visuospatial cues for the underlying task goal and tested how this affected young children's behavior. Our results bridge the gap between the infant and adult literatures, showing that sensitivity to spatial configurations persists from infancy to childhood, but it is only around the fifth year of life that children naturally start to integrate multiple cues to guide their behavior.

Cascaded acquisition of spatial contextual cueing

Spatial contextual cueing refers to the facilitation of visual search when invariant spatial configurations of the target and distractors are learned. Using the instance theory of automatization and the reverse hierarchy theory of visual perceptual learning, this study explores the acquisition of spatial contextual cueing. The findings support the reverse hierarchy theory, which predicts that the acquisition of spatial contextual cueing progresses in an easy-to-difficult cascading manner. However, these findings are inconsistent with instance theory, which predicts that the acquisition of spatial contextual cueing in easy-half-repeated trials would keep pace with that in difficult-half-repeated trials. This study concludes that compared with instance theory, reverse hierarchy theory more plausibly explains the acquisition of spatial contextual cueing.

The contextual cueing effect disappears during joint search in preschool children

During preschool years, children's interacting with others increases. One of the involved developmental skills is task co-representation, through which children aged 5 years and older represent a partner's task in a similar way to their own task. In adults, task co-representation makes participants attend to and form memories of objects relevant to both their own task and their partner's task; however, it is unclear whether children can also form such memories. In Experiment 1, we examined the memory facilitation of joint search using a contextual cueing effect paradigm. Children were presented with search displays repeatedly with the same or random layouts and searched and responded to the target either alone (the single group; n = 32; M_age = 73.6 months, range = 61-80) or with their parent (the joint group; n = 32; M_age = 74.3 months, range = 64-81). Results showed that the search with the same layouts was faster than that with the random layouts for the single group, indicating that children form associative memories of target and distractors relevant to their own task. For the joint group, this effect was not statistically different from that of the single group, with exploratory analysis suggesting that it was disrupted. In Experiment 2, children performed the search with a peer (n = 32; M_age = 72.7 months, range = 67-79) and the effect was also not found. Our findings suggest that the self's and partner's tasks are represented but might not be incorporated into associative memory in 5- and 6-year-old children.

The effects of perceptual cues on visual statistical learning: Evidence from children and adults

In visual statistical learning, one can extract the statistical regularities of target locations in an incidental manner. The current study examined the impact of salient perceptual cues on one type of visual statistical learning: probability cueing effects. In a visual search task, the target appeared more often in one quadrant (i.e., rich) than the other quadrants (i.e., sparse). Then, the screen was rotated by 90° and the targets appeared in the four quadrants with equal probabilities. In Experiment 1 without the addition of salient perceptual cues, adults showed significant probability cueing effects, but did not show a persistent attentional bias in the testing phase. In Experiments 2, 3, and 4, salient perceptual cues were added to the rich or the sparse quadrants. Adults showed significant probability cueing effects but no persistent attentional bias. In Experiment 5, younger children, older children, and adults showed significant probability cueing effects. All three groups also showed an attentional gradient phenomenon: reaction times were slower when the targets were in the sparse quadrant diagonal to, rather than adjacent to, the rich quadrant. Furthermore, both children groups showed a persistent egocentric attentional bias in the testing phase. These findings indicated that salient perceptual cues enhanced but did not reduce probability cueing effects, children and adults shared similar basic attentional mechanisms in probability cueing effects, and children and adults showed differences in the persistence of attentional bias.

Visual statistical learning in children and adults: evidence from probability cueing

In visual statistical learning (VSL), one can extract and exhibit memory for the statistical regularities of target locations in an incidental manner. The current study examined the development of VSL using the probability cueing paradigm with salient perceptual cues. We also investigated the elicited attention gradient phenomenon in VSL. In a visual search task, the target first appeared more often in one quadrant (i.e., rich) than the other quadrants (i.e., sparse). Then, the participants rotated the screen by 90° and the targets appeared in the four quadrants with equal probabilities. Each quadrant had a unique background color and was, hence, associated with salient perceptual cues. 1st-4th graders and adults participated. All participants showed probability cueing effects to a similar extent. We observed an attention gradient phenomenon, as all participants responded slower to the sparse quadrant that was distant from, rather than the ones that were adjacent to the rich quadrant. In the testing phase, all age groups showed persistent attentional biases based on both egocentric and allocentric perspectives. These findings showed that probability cueing effects may develop early, that perceptual cues can bias attention guidance during VSL for both children and adults, and that VSL can elicit a spaced-based attention gradient phenomenon for children and adults.

The functional consequences of social attention on memory precision and on memory-guided orienting in development

Adults are slower at locating targets in naturalistic scenes containing a social distractor compared to an equally salient non-social distractor, and their subsequent memory for targets in social scenes is poorer. Therefore, adults’ social biases affect not only attention, but also their memory. Six-to-ten year-old children and young adults took part in the current study, employing a combination of behavioural and eye-tracking measures. Social stimuli in naturalistic scenes distracted both children and adults during visual search, as demonstrated by their gaze behavior and search times. In addition, eye-tracking revealed even greater attentional capture by social distractors for children. Memory for targets was worse in social compared to non-social scenes. Intriguingly, children demonstrated overall better memory precision than adults. Finally, when participants detected previously learnt targets within visual scenes, adults were slower for targets appearing at unexpected (invalid) locations within social scenes compared to non-social scenes, but this was not the case for children. In their entirety, these findings suggest that the interplay between social attentional biases, memory and memory-guided attention is complex and modulated by age-related differences. Complementary methodologies in developmental cognitive neuroscience shed light on the mechanisms through which social attention and memory interact over development.

Implicit memory of locations and identities: A developmental study

Objects in the environment have both location and identity properties. However, it is unclear how these independent properties are processed and combined in the implicit domain. The current study investigated the development of the implicit memory of object locations and object identities, both independently and combined, and the relation between implicit memory and working memory (WM) for these properties. Three age groups participated: 6- and 7-year-old children, 9- and 10-year-old children, and adults. Children and adults completed a repeated search paradigm. In the learning phase, targets' locations were consistently predicted by both the identities and locations of the distracters. In the test phase, either both remained predictive or just the identities or just the locations of the distracters predicted the location of the target. All groups showed significant implicit learning when both the identities and locations of the distracters remained predictive. When only the locations but not the identities of the distracters were predictive, adults and 9- and 10-year-olds showed significant learning, whereas 6- and 7-year-olds did not. When only the identities but not the locations of the distracters were predictive, none of the groups showed significant learning effects. In evaluating the contributions of either visual or spatial WM to implicit learning and memory, we found that children with smaller visual WM exhibited larger implicit memory effects for object identities than did children with larger visual WM. Taken together, the results indicate that children's ability to differentiate identity and location undergoes development even in the implicit domain.

Encouraging top-down attention in visual search:A developmental perspective

Four experiments are reported in which 60 younger children (7-8 years old), 60 older children (10-11 years old), and 60 young adults (18-25 years old) performed a conjunctive visual search task (15 per group in each experiment). The number of distractors of each feature type was unbalanced across displays to evaluate participants' ability to restrict search to the smaller subset of features. The use of top-down attention processes to restrict search was encouraged by providing external aids for identifying and maintaining attention on the smaller set. In Experiment 1, no external assistance was provided. In Experiment 2, precues and instructions were provided to focus attention on that subset. In Experiment 3, trials in which the smaller subset was represented by the same feature were presented in alternating blocks to eliminate the need to switch attention between features from trial to trial. In Experiment 4, consecutive blocks of the same subset features were presented in the first or second half of the experiment, providing additional consistency. All groups benefited from external support of top-down attention, although the pattern of improvement varied across experiments. The younger children benefited most from precues and instruction, using the subset search strategy when instructed. Furthermore, younger children benefited from blocking trials only when blocks of the same features did not alternate. Older participants benefited from the blocking of trials in both Experiments 3 and 4, but not from precues and instructions. Hence, our results revealed both malleability and limits of children's top-down control of attention.

Age-related similarities in contextual cueing in the presence of unpredictive distracters

Contextual cueing effects of 6-8-year-old children, 10-12-year-old-children, and college students were compared under conditions in which some of the distracters in the search displays predicted the location of the target and other distracters did not. More specifically, the percent of distracters that predicted the location of the target varied across three conditions (100%, 67%, and 33%). Previous research had indicated that children are impacted more than adults when the percent of predictive distracters is relatively low. However, that research included new displays as well as repeated displays as participants were implicitly learning the association between the predictive distracters and the target. This re-evaluation did not introduce new display until a separate test phase. Results suggested that all three age groups demonstrated significant and comparable contextual cueing effects across all three signal-to-noise ratio conditions. Hence, children appear to possess the general ability to extract and remember information associated with spatial regularities in the presence of considerable spatial noise. In addition, contextual cueing effects were linked to improvements in search efficiency for all groups in this study, providing another degree of similarity across variations in age.

The acquisition of contextual cueing effects by persons with and without intellectual disability

Two experiments were conducted to compare the acquisition of contextual cueing effects of adolescents and young adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) relative to typically developing children and young adults. Contextual cueing reflects an implicit, memory based attention guidance mechanism that results in faster search for target locations that have been previously experienced in a predictable context. In the study, participants located a target stimulus embedded in a context of numerous distracter stimuli. During a learning phase, the location of the target was predictable from the location of the distracters in the search displays. We then compared response times to locating predictable relative to unpredictable targets presented in a test phase. In Experiment 1, all of the distracters predicted the location of the target. In Experiment 2, half of the distracters predicted the location of the target while the other half varied randomly. The participants with ID exhibited significant contextual facilitation in both experiments, with the magnitude of facilitation being similar to that of the typically developing (TD) children and adults. We concluded that deficiencies in contextual cueing are not necessarily associated with low measured intelligence that results in a classification of ID.