Contextual cueing in co-active visual search: joint action allows acquisition of task-irrelevant context

Xuelian Zang1, Artyom Zinchenko2, Jiao Wu1, Xiuna Zhu2, Fang Fang3 & Zhuanghua Shi2

1. Center for Cognition and Brain Disorders, Affiliated Hospital of Hangzhou Normal University, 310015, China.
2. Department Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit?t M¨¹nchen, Munich, Germany
3. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

*. Note Xuelian Zang and Artyom Zinchenko contributed equally to this manuscript.

Abstract

Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect termed as ¡°contextual cueing¡±. Previous solo-performance studies have shown that successful acquisition of contextual memories requires explicit allocation of attentional resources to the task-relevant repeated contexts. By contrast, repeated, but task-irrelevant contexts could not be learned when presented together with repeated task-relevant contexts due to blocking effect. Here we investigated if such blocking of context learning could be diminished in social context, when the task-irrelevant context is a task-relevant for a co-actor in joint action search mode. We adopted the contextual cueing paradigm and extended to the co-active search mode. Participants learned a context-cued subset of the search displays (color-defined) in the training phase, and their search performance was tested in the transfer phase, where previously irrelevant and relevant subsets were swapped. The experiments were conducted either in a solo search mode (Experiments 1 and 3) or in a co-active search mode (Experiment 2). Consistent with the classical contextual cueing studies, contextual cueing was observed in the training phase of all three experiments. Importantly, however, in the ¡®swapped¡¯ test session a significant contextual cueing effect was manifested only in the co-active search mode, but not in the solo search mode. Our findings suggest that social context may widen the scope of attention, thus facilitating the acquisition of task-irrelevant contexts.

Data and code

• data: Exp1_AllData.mat, Exp2_AllData.mat, Exp3_AllData.mat, Exp2RTTh.mat
• Analysis codes: dataProcessAll_Exp1.m, dataProcessAll_Exp2.m, dataProcessAll_Exp3.m, dataProcessExp2v3.m