Category-specific learning of color, orientation, and position regularities guide visual search.

In six experiments, we examined how object categories structure the learning of environmental regularities to guide visual search. Participants searched for pictures of exemplars from a set of real-world categories in a repeated search task modeled on the contextual cuing literature. Each trial began with a category label cue, followed by a search array of natural object photographs, with one target object matching the category label. Participants completed a series of search blocks, each containing one search trial per category. Individual categories were assigned either to the Repeated condition or to the Novel condition. For Repeated categories, a perceptual feature value of target objects remained constant across each search for that category: color (Experiments 1 and 3), orientation (Experiment 2), and position (Experiment 4). For Novel categories, the relevant feature value varied randomly for each search for that category. We observed a categorical cuing effect, with faster improvement in reaction time across blocks for Repeated compared with Novel categories. This effect reflected both the episodic retrieval of the immediately preceding search episode in that category and cumulative learning across multiple searches within a category. The cuing effect was observed from the very first repetition, a point in the experiment where the learning effect was not plausibly strategic. Finally, participants could reliably retrieve and report the repeated values in memory tests administered either at the end of the experiment or when the effect first emerged (Experiments 5 and 6), demonstrating that nonstrategic guidance of attention can be driven by explicitly available memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Real-world object categories and scene contexts conjointly structure statistical learning for the guidance of visual search.

We examined how object categories and scene contexts act in conjunction to structure the acquisition and use of statistical regularities to guide visual search. In an exposure session, participants viewed five object exemplars in each of two colors in each of 42 real-world categories. Objects were presented individually against scene context backgrounds. Exemplars within a category were presented with different contexts as a function of color (e.g., the five red staplers were presented with a classroom scene, and the five blue staplers with an office scene). Participants then completed a visual search task, in which they searched for novel exemplars matching a category label cue among arrays of eight objects superimposed over a scene background. In the context-match condition, the color of the target exemplar was consistent with the color associated with that combination of category and scene context from the exposure phase (e.g., a red stapler in a classroom scene). In the context-mismatch condition, the color of the target was not consistent with that association (e.g., a red stapler in an office scene). In two experiments, search response time was reliably lower in the context-match than in the context-mismatch condition, demonstrating that the learning of category-specific color regularities was itself structured by scene context. The results indicate that categorical templates retrieved from long-term memory are biased toward the properties of recent exemplars and that this learning is organized in a scene-specific manner.

Categorical cuing: Object categories structure the acquisition of statistical regularities to guide visual search.

Recent statistical regularities have been demonstrated to influence visual search across a wide variety of learning mechanisms and search features. To function in the guidance of real-world search, however, such learning must be contingent on the context in which the search occurs and the object that is the target of search. The former has been studied extensively under the rubric of contextual cuing. Here, we examined, for the first time, categorical cuing: The role of object categories in structuring the acquisition of statistical regularities used to guide visual search. After an exposure session in which participants viewed six exemplars with the same general color in each of 40 different real-world categories, they completed a categorical search task, in which they searched for any member of a category based on a label cue. Targets that matched recent within-category regularities were found faster than targets that did not (Experiment 1). Such categorical cuing was also found to span multiple recent colors within a category (Experiment 2). It was observed to influence both the guidance of search to the target object (Experiment 3) and the basic operation of assigning single exemplars to categories (Experiment 4). Finally, the rapid acquisition of category-specific regularities was also quickly modified, with the benefit rapidly decreasing during the search session as participants were exposed equally to the two possible colors in each category. The results demonstrate that object categories organize the acquisition of perceptual regularities and that this learning exerts strong control over the instantiation of the category representation as a template for visual search. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).