Contextual cueing in co-active visual search: shared attention allows acquisition of task-irrelevant context

Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect termed “contextual cueing”. Previous solo-performance studies have shown that contextual learning requires explicit allocation of attentional resources to the task-relevant repeated context, while repeated, but task-irrelevant subsets of items show no contextual benefits. Lack of attention to repeated, but task-irrelevant contexts may weaken contextual cueing. In a co-active environment, however, people often share some attention to both self-relevant and co-actor relevant context. Whether participants can acquire co-actor relevant, but self-irrelevant repeated contexts remains unsolved. Thus, the present study adopted the contextual cueing paradigm under the co-active social context. Participants learned a cued subset of the search display (either black or white) in the learning phase, and tested the search performance for the irrelevant subsets in the transfer phase. The experiment was conducted either in a solo condition (Experiments 1 and 3) or in a joint-action condition(Experiment 2). Contextual cueing was observed in all three experiments in the training phase. However, contextual learning of the irrelevant context in the transfer session was only manifested in the joint-action Experiment 2. Our findings suggest that shared focus of attention between partners enables representations of a coactor's task prompting contextual learning of otherwise irrelevant context. We conclude that the social interaction may widen the scope of attention, thus facilitating the acquisition of task-irrelevant contexts.

在稳定的搜索阵列中重复呈现目标可促进视觉搜索，这一效应被称为‘情境线索效应（contextual cueing）’。以往的单人表现研究表明，情境学习需要将注意资源明确分配给与任务相关的重复情境，而重复但与任务无关的项目子集则无情境获益。对重复但与任务无关的情境缺乏注意可能会削弱情境线索效应。然而，在共同活动环境中，人们通常会将部分注意分配给自身相关和合作行动者相关的情境。参与者能否习得与合作行动者相关但与自身无关的重复情境仍是未解之谜。因此，本研究在共同活动的社会情境下采用情境线索范式。参与者在学习阶段习得搜索显示中被提示的子集（黑色或白色），并在迁移阶段测试对无关子集的搜索表现。实验分为单人条件（实验1和3）和联合行动条件（实验2）。训练阶段的三个实验均观察到情境线索效应。然而，迁移阶段对无关情境的情境学习仅在联合行动的实验2中显现。研究结果表明，伙伴间共享的注意焦点可促成对合作行动者任务的表征，进而促进对原本无关情境的情境学习。我们认为，社会互动可能拓宽注意范围，从而推动对任务无关情境的习得。