Contextual cueing in target absent trials by distractor-distractor associations

Contextual cueing refers to finding a target more efficiently in repeated displays than in novel displays. However, conflicting results have been reported regarding whether target absent judgments can also be efficient in repeated displays. To resolve this controversy, we first tested 3 factors that might influence the strength of distractor-distractor associations and then investigated how such associations produced faster responses on repeated target absent trials by measuring the patterns of eye movements. The factors were the number of distractors, number of repeated configurations, and diversity of the distractors' properties. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that the diversity of the distractors was the only factor producing contextual cueing without a target. In Experiment 3, we recorded eye movements during a search task and found that the contextual cueing effect in the target absent condition was due to the lower number of fixations and larger mean saccadic amplitudes. Overall, these results suggest that the distractor-distractor associations, strengthened by the diversity of the distractors' properties, widened the attentional window. This enlarged window in turn helps people to reject more distractors at once and enables them to terminate a visual search faster in repeated target absent trials. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).