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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Feb 25, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Published on: November 30, 2018

Meaning in learning: Contextual cueing relies on objects' visual features and not on objects' meaning.

¹Department of Education and Psychology, The Open University of Israel, Ra'anana, Israel. tal.makovski@gmail.com.

Memory & Cognition

|August 4, 2017

Summary

Contextual cueing (CC) helps visual search by learning object locations. This study shows that contextual cueing relies on visual features and spatial arrangement, not object meaning.

Keywords:

Contextual cueing Semantics Visual learning Visual search

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Visual Perception
Neuroscience

Background:

Humans naturally learn environmental regularities to improve visual search.
Contextual cueing (CC) demonstrates this learning, even in complex scenes with repeated distractors.
The role of object meaning versus visual features in CC remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine whether contextual cueing relies on object meaning or visual features.
To investigate the contribution of semantic information versus visual properties in spatial learning.

Main Methods:

Experiment 1: Assessed CC with objects whose meaning was diminished.
Experiments 2 & 3: Manipulated object meaning and visual properties to isolate their effects on CC.
Utilized real-world object images in heterogeneous visual search tasks.

Main Results:

Contextual cueing occurred even when object meaning was largely removed.
Distorting object meaning did not eliminate CC if visual properties were preserved.
CC was abolished when object meaning was kept but visual properties changed.

Conclusions:

Contextual cueing for real-world object search is primarily driven by visual features and spatial locations.
Semantic meaning of objects does not appear to be a necessary component for this type of contextual learning.
This finding has implications for understanding visual attention and environmental learning.