The impact of signal-to-noise ratio on contextual cueing in 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.

The distinct development of stimulus and response serial dependence

Serial dependence (SD) is a phenomenon wherein current perceptions are biased by the previous stimulus and response. This helps to attenuate perceptual noise and variability in sensory input and facilitates stable ongoing perceptions of the environment. However, little is known about the developmental trajectory of SD. This study investigates how the stimulus and response biases of the SD effect develop across three age groups. Conventional analyses, in which previous stimulus and response biases were assessed separately, revealed significant changes in the biases over time. Previous stimulus bias shifted from repulsion to attraction, while previous response bias evolved from attraction to greater attraction. However, there was a strong correlation between stimulus and response orientations. Therefore, a generalized linear mixed-effects (GLME) analysis that simultaneously considered both previous stimulus and response, outperformed separate analyses. This revealed that previous stimulus and response resulted in two distinct biases with different developmental trajectories. The repulsion bias of previous stimulus remained relatively stable across all age groups, whereas the attraction bias of previous response was significantly stronger in adults than in children and adolescents. These findings demonstrate that the repulsion bias towards preceding stimuli is established early in the developing brain (at least by around 10 years old), while the attraction bias towards responses is not fully developed until adulthood. Our findings provide new insights into the development of the SD phenomenon and how humans integrate two opposing mechanisms into their perceptual responses to external input during development.

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.

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.

Local and global context repetitions in contextual cueing

In contextual cueing tasks, participants can use a repeating local context to learn to detect the target, yet most contextual cueing studies have relied on repeating global context properties. We examined whether observers can use local context repetitions in a similar manner as they use global context repetitions. In addition, we examined how reward-predicting context features modulate the use of local and global contexts. Participants searched through contexts in which either the entire context configuration or only a local context around the target repeated, intermixed with novel contexts. Half of the context items appeared in a color signaling either low or high reward. We found that local context repetitions led to comparable benefits in response times and fixation count as global context repetitions did. Surprisingly, reward magnitude did not affect performance in local nor in global contexts. The results suggest that a local chunk of distractors can be used for context learning and attention guidance in a similar manner as the global context configuration. We suggest that the proportion of repeated and novel context trials is crucial for context learning and that our combination of locally and globally repeating contexts provided an environment that facilitated learning in both context types because it allowed predicting the target location from the context in most of the trials.

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.

Differential Effects of Salient Visual Events on Memory-Guided Attention in Adults and Children

Both salient visual events and scene‐based memories can influence attention, but it is unclear how they interact in children and adults. In Experiment 1, children (N = 27; ages 7–12) were faster to discriminate targets when they appeared at the same versus different location as they had previously learned or as a salient visual event. In contrast, adults (N = 30; ages 18–31) responded faster only when cued by visual events. While Experiment 2 confirmed that adults (N = 27) can use memories to orient attention, Experiment 3 showed that, even in the absence of visual events, the effects of memories on attention were larger in children (N = 27) versus adults (N = 28). These findings suggest that memories may be a robust source of influence on children's attention.

Global Repetition Influences Contextual Cueing

Our visual system has a striking ability to improve visual search based on the learning of repeated ambient regularities, an effect named contextual cueing. Whereas most of the previous studies investigated contextual cueing effect with the same number of repeated and non-repeated search displays per block, the current study focused on whether a global repetition frequency formed by different presentation ratios between the repeated and non-repeated configurations influence contextual cueing effect. Specifically, the number of repeated and non-repeated displays presented in each block was manipulated: 12:12, 20:4, 4:20, and 4:4 in Experiments 1-4, respectively. The results revealed a significant contextual cueing effect when the global repetition frequency is high (≥1:1 ratio) in Experiments 1, 2, and 4, given that processing of repeated displays was expedited relative to non-repeated displays. Nevertheless, the contextual cueing effect reduced to a non-significant level when the repetition frequency reduced to 4:20 in Experiment 3. These results suggested that the presentation frequency of repeated relative to the non-repeated displays could influence the strength of contextual cueing. In other words, global repetition statistics could be a crucial factor to mediate contextual cueing effect.

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.