Contextual Cueing in Naturalistic Scenes: Global and Local Contexts James R. Brockmole University of Edinburgh Monica S. Castelhano University of Massachusetts—Amherst John M. Henderson Michigan State University In contextual cueing, the position of a target within a group of distractors is learned over repeated exposure to a display with reference to a few nearby items rather than to the global pattern created by the elements. The authors contrasted the role of global and local contexts for contextual cueing in naturalistic scenes. Experiment 1 showed that learned target positions transfer when local information is altered but not when global information is changed. Experiment 2 showed that scene–target covariation is learned more slowly when local, but not global, information is repeated across trials than when global but not local information is repeated. Thus, in naturalistic scenes, observers are biased to associate target locations with global contexts. Keywords: contextual cueing, scenes, visual search, visual attention, visual memory Repeated exposure to a specific arrangement of target and distractor items leads to a progressively more efficient search, an effect called contextual cueing (e.g., Chua & Chun, 2003; Chun & Jiang, 1998, 1999, 2003; Jiang & Chun, 2001; Olson & Chun, 2002). For example, in their seminal work on this effect, Chun and Jiang (1998) had observers search for a rotated T hidden among rotated Ls. Over the course of trials, a subset of stimuli was consistently repeated with the arrangement of the target and dis- tractor elements fixed. Across multiple repetitions, search times for repeated displays became faster than those for novel displays. This effect occurred without observers being aware that displays were repeated and without observers having explicit memory of target positions. Similar findings have been obtained with arrays of novel two- and three-dimensional (3D) shapes (Chua & Chun, 2003; Chun & Jiang, 1999). Recently, Brockmole and Henderson (2006; see also Brockmole & Henderson, in press) completed the first investigation of con- textual cueing in which real-world scenes constituted the learning context. Like artificial stimulus arrays, real-world scenes have stable structures (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). For example, each time we go to our neighborhood park, we recognize the athletic fields, playground equipment, and pavilions as the same objects and features arranged in the same spatial configuration. Even objects that can be moved appear in regular spatial arrange- ments; strollers are often lined up near the benches, and kites are in the air. In an examination of how regularities within real-world environments are used to guide visual attention to behaviorally relevant targets, observers were given the task of searching for and identifying a target letter arbitrarily embedded in scene photo- graphs. Although search times across novel scenes remained con- stant throughout the experiment, search times for letters appearing in a consistent position within repeated scenes decreased across repetitions. With real-world scenes, however, memory for scene– target covariation was explicit; observers recognized repeated scenes more often than those that were presented once and dis- played superior recall of target position within the repeated scenes. In addition, when scenes were inverted to increase recognition difficulty, the rate of learning was markedly reduced, suggesting information concerning object and scene identity is used to guide attention. These results indicate that paradigms using nonscene stimuli have led only to a partial characterization of contextual cueing within the real world. A critical issue concerning contextual cueing in scenes is the nature of the information that is used to reference the target position. Previous studies using nonscene stimulus arrays have obtained evidence that the target is associated with a few nearby items, rather than with the global pattern or structure created by the elements in the display. For example, context–target associations have been shown to transfer to new contexts that have different global arrangements of elements as long as some local aspects of the previously learned context are preserved in the new global arrangement (Jiang & Wagner, 2004). This effect was so strong that even when the global context of the search arrays was high- lighted by a line that connected all distractors to form a global James R. Brockmole, Department of Psychology, University of Edin- burgh; Monica S. Castelhano, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts—Amherst; John M. Henderson, Department of Psychology, Michigan State University. This research was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant BCS-0094433 and NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Re- search Traineeship Grant ECS-9874541, Army Research Office Grant W911NF-04-1– 0078, and a Strategic Partnership Grant from the Michigan State University Foundation. We thank Artem Belopolsky and Sian Beilock for their comments on this research. We also thank Jennifer Garman for her help with stimulus development and Devon Witherell for his help with data collection. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to James R. Brockmole, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ United Kingdom. E-mail: James.Brockmole@ed.ac.uk Journal of Experimental Psychology: Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2006, Vol. 32, No. 4, 699 –706 0278-7393/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.32.4.699 699