Spatial Cueing Effects Reflect Direct Influences of Experience and Not Updated Goals

Previous research contends that the spatial cueing effect (SCE) is influenced exclusively by top-down sources of information (Theeuwes, 2018); however, others purport that the SCE can be affected by experience, either indirectly (via the updating of top-down information) or directly (Anderson et al., 2021). The present study used a novel two-choice, spatial cueing paradigm in order to investigate the influence of experience on the SCE. In each of 4 different conditions, participants were presented with the choice between two visual search tasks of different validities. Conditions varied by competing context cue validity and distinctiveness; context choice and performance measures (response time and error rates) were used to measure the alignment of an individual’s top-down goals and implicit performance.

Findings revealed that while an individual’s top-down goals remained consistent with an increasing preference for the higher spatial validity context within a condition, the SCE associated with each context was significantly affected by the competing context with which it was paired. Further, the SCE associated with each context varied as a function of experience, supporting that spatial cueing effects reflect the direct influence of experience and not the top-down updating of goals.