Figure 3.

The contextual cueing task. (A) Illustration of the basic contextual cueing paradigm. Participants attempt to locate a target (i.e., a rotated T) from among an array of distractors (i.e., rotated L's) as quickly as possible upon display presentation. A subset of the displays are repeated several times over the course of the experiment. (B) Illustration of the results from Chun and Phelps (1999). Both amnesic patients and controls show improved skill learning (i.e., faster target identification) over the course of the experiment, but patients show no evidence for contextual cueing. (C) Illustration of conditions used in the modified version of the contextual cueing task that was used to examine transfer effects, and was developed by Jiang and Wagner (2004). Trained displays were seen during learning, and were also used to create recombined displays. Color coding (shades of blue) was not used in the experiment, but is meant to illustrate how the recombined display was created. Half of the elements in the display were from one trained display, the remainder were from the other. The lines connecting the display elements are meant to illustrate the differences in overall gestalt of the display configuration, and were not present during testing. Notice that the shape of the global configuration is different for the recombined display than for both trained displays. Novel displays controlled for any facilitation in responding that might be due to the target location alone. The standard skill learning effect is illustrated in the graph on the left. Effects of transfer are illustrated in the graph on the right. The time required to locate and respond to a target was not different for recombined and old displays, and both of these display types elicited faster responses than novel displays. Such results provide evidence for flexible transfer of learning from trained displays to recombined displays. [Figure 3B reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd; http://www.nature.com/; Figure 3C, graphs, reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media.].