Statistical learning guides visual attention within iconic memory

The present study investigated interactions between iconic memory and long-term memory during visual search. The contextual cueing paradigm was combined with a brief presentation procedure to determine whether statistical learning takes place from flashed displays and acts as a cue to guide spatial attention within iconic memory in subsequent visual search. In five experiments, participants were exposed to search displays that were presented for only 50 ms and had to detect a target among 11 distractors. Half of those displays were repeated across the task and half were presented once. The results revealed a contextual cueing effect in four of the experiments, revealing the capacity of the human brain to extract spatial regularities from very brief visual presentations and to later activate this knowledge to guide attention within a representation briefly maintained within iconic memory.