Contextually Cued Visual Sequences of Attention

Repeated exposure to a context has the ability to guide attention toward task-relevant locations, often without awareness. Previous research on contextual cuing typically uses only one relevant location for each context. Thus, in the present study, we aimed to measure whether multiple locations could be contextually cued for each context. Moreover, each trial required a sequence of eye movements as each location had to be fixated in a specific order. A second experiment sought to observe the automaticity of these sequential eye movements with the implementation of a transfer task. Results for the first experiment and the training phase of the second experiment showed significant improvement in performance for repeated versus novel contexts. Surprisingly, in Experiment 2, the learned sequence of eye movements did not transfer to a novel task in the same context. In addition, exit questions suggested higher levels of context repetition awareness than in most previous contextual cuing studies.