Does it matter who was where? Learning identity-to-location binding from faces

Abstract

People unconsciously learn spatial information about places they encounter frequently, leading them to search through familiar scenes faster than for unfamiliar scenes. We explored this phenomenon—the contextual cueing effect—in scenes containing images of different human faces. Participants searched through a series of scenes for a target among distractors, characterized as a letter T among letter L’s with each letter positioned on top of a face image (Experiment 1) or as a female face among male faces (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that when the binding of identity and location was manipulated during learning, slightly greater (but not statistically significant) contextual cueing effects were found for repeated scenes with constant identity-to-location binding than those repeated scenes with constant spatial configurations but shuffled identity-to-location binding. Experiment 2 showed that if the binding of identity-to-location changed after the learning of a set of identity-to-location binding, small (but not statistically significant) costs of contextual cueing were found. The results suggest that in the contextual cueing paradigm, repeated identity-to-location binding might be learned but the learning of repeated spatial configurations alone account for a major portion of the learning.