Роль рабочей памяти в механизме эффекта контекстной подсказки: исследование методом регистрации движений глаз

Психологические исследования: электронный научный журнал. 2024. Т. 17. № 97. Статья 5.

Signayevskaya K., Gorbunova E. S.

The present study investigates the contextual cueing effect under different levels of object working memory (WM) load. According to this effect, repeated exposure to a particular configuration of target objects and distractors leads to a decrease in target retrieval time. At the same time, subjects could not distinguish between «old» and «new» configurations, suggesting that this effect is implicit. There are theories of «early» and «late» locus of contextual cueing: according to the first, the effect occurs before the target has been detected. According to the second theory, the effect occurs after the target has been detected. These ideas are consistent with the distinction between guidance and verification processes in visual search. Previous studies have shown mixed results regarding the influence of WM on the occurrence of the contextual cueing effect, and there have been no previous studies using an eye tracker to investigate the role of WM in the occurrence of this effect. We conducted an experiment to identify patterns that emerge during a dual task combining a visual search task and an object WM load task. Reaction time, number of fixations and duration of fixations on the target were the dependent variables. The results of the study showed that for reaction time and number of fixations, the contextual cueing effect decreased with increasing WM load, whereas for variable duration of fixations on the target, the effect was robust to any WM load. The result supports the idea that, in terms of reaction time and number of fixations on the target, a high WM load leads to a violation of guidance, and therefore to the disappearance of the contextual cueingeffect, while the duration of fixation on the target does not depend on the WM load, although it reflects the occurrence of this effect.

Keywords: working memory, рабочая память, зрительный поиск, eye tracking, айтрекинг, имплицитное научение, implicit learning, visual search, contextual cueing effect, эффект контекстной подсказки

Publication based on the results of: Psychological mechanisms for completing cognitive tasks in human-digital interaction (2024)