Selective attention determines the effectiveness of implicit contextual learning (e.g., Jiang and Leung, 2005). Visual foreground-background segmentation, on the other hand, is a key process in the guidance of attention (Wolfe, 2003). In the present study, we examined the impact of foreground-background segmentation on contextual cueing of visual search in three experiments. A visual search display, consisting of distractor ‘L’s and a target ‘T’, was overlaid on a task-neutral cuboid on the same depth plane (Experiment 1), on stereoscopically separated depth planes (Experiment 2), or spread over the entire display on the same depth plane (Experiment 3). Half of the search displays contained repeated target-distractor arrangements, whereas the other half was always newly generated. The task-neutral cuboid was constant during an initial training session, but was either rotated by 90° or entirely removed in the subsequent test sessions. We found that the gains resulting from repeated presentation of display arrangements during training (i.e., contextual-cueing effects) were diminished when the cuboid was changed or removed in Experiment 1, but remained intact in Experiments 2 and 3 when the cuboid was placed in a different depth plane, or when the items were randomly spread over the whole display but not on the edges of the cuboid. These findings suggest that foreground-background segmentation occurs prior to contextual learning, and only objects/arrangements that are grouped as foreground are learned over the course of repeated visual search.
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机译：选择性注意力决定了内隐语境学习的有效性（例如Jiang and Leung，2005）。另一方面，视觉前景-背景分割是引导注意力的关键过程（Wolfe，2003）。在本研究中，我们通过三个实验研究了前景背景分割对视觉搜索上下文提示的影响。视觉搜索显示由干扰物“ L”和目标“ T”组成，覆盖在同一深度平面（实验1），立体分离的深度平面（实验2）上的任务中立长方体上，或覆盖整个对象在同一深度平面上显示（实验3）。搜索显示中有一半包含重复的目标分散器布置，而另一半总是新生成的。与任务无关的长方体在最初的训练过程中保持恒定，但在以后的测试过程中被旋转90°或完全移开。我们发现，在实验1中更改或移除长方体时，在训练过程中重复展示展示布置所获得的收益（即上下文提示效果）会降低，但在长方体中放置长方体时，在实验2和3中保持不变。不同深度的平面，或者当物品随机分布在整个显示器上而不是在长方体的边缘上时。这些发现表明，前景背景分割发生在上下文学习之前，并且在重复的视觉搜索过程中，仅学习了被分组为前景的对象/布置。
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