Contextual Cueing Effect

The contextual cueing effect is the finding that a visual target embedded in a spatial arrangement of items a person has seen before is found faster than the same target set among a novel arrangement, even when the person cannot consciously tell the repeated layout apart from a new one. Marvin Chun and Yuhong Jiang established the standard task for studying it in a 1998 study, showing that repeated exposure to an arrangement of a target among distractors lets the visual system learn that stable spatial layout and use it to guide attention more efficiently on later encounters, a form of implicit, unconscious learning rather than deliberate memorization. Because the effect depends on associating a spatial context with a memory representation, researchers have linked it to the hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe structures, partly on the basis that patients with damage to those structures show impaired contextual learning of this kind.