Contextual cueing and attention control: Self-face vs. stranger-face search

The contextual cueing effect demonstrates that visual search is faster when targets appear in repeated, rather than nonrepeated, spatial configurations-a phenomenon attributed to learned attentional guidance. This study investigated how attention, modulated by social salience of face stimuli, influences such implicit spatial learning. Using self-face and stranger-face images as search items, participants located a unique-identity target among distractors of another identity. The face identity condition was implemented using a between-subjects design in Experiment 1 and a within-subjects design in Experiment 2. Results revealed a critical dissociation: Reliable contextual cueing emerged when participants searched for a self-face target among stranger-face distractors. Conversely, this learning effect was consistently attenuated or absent when self-faces served as distractors during searches for a stranger target. We propose that self-face distractors function as an "attentional magnet." They not only capture attention effectively but also disrupt the global processing required to encode the spatial layout of a scene. This impairs the formation of stable context-target associations, without necessarily slowing overall search speed. Our findings underscore an asymmetric influence of self-relevance and highlight how social salience can selectively disrupt implicit spatial learning when salient stimuli are task irrelevant.