Abstract：
Contextual cueing is a phenomenon in which repeatedly encountered arrays of items can enhance the visual search for a target item. This is widely attributed to attentional guidance driven by contextual memory acquired during visual search. Some studies suggest that children may have an immature ability to use contextual cues compared to adults, while others argue that contextual learning capacity is similar across ages. To test the development of context-guided attention, this study compared contextual cueing effects among three age groups: adults (aged 18-33 years, N = 32), teenagers (aged 15-17 years, N = 41), and younger children (aged 8-9 years, N = 43). Moreover, this study introduced a measure of response time variability that tracks fluctuations in response time throughout the experiment, in addition to the conventional analysis of response times. The results showed that all age groups demonstrated significantly faster responses in repeated than non-repeated search contexts. Notably, adults and teenagers exhibited smaller response time variability in repeated contexts than in non-repeated ones, while younger children did not. This implies that children are less efficient at consolidating contextual information into a stable memory representation, which may lead to less stable attentional guidance during visual search.
摘要：
上下文提示是一种现象，其中重复遇到的项目数组可以增强对目标项目的视觉搜索。这广泛归因于在视觉搜索过程中获得的上下文记忆所驱动的注意力指导。一些研究表明，与成年人相比，儿童使用语境线索的能力可能不成熟，而其他人则认为不同年龄的情境学习能力相似。为了测试情境引导注意力的发展，这项研究比较了三个年龄组的情境提示效果：成年人(18-33岁，N=32),青少年（15-17岁，N=41),和年幼的儿童(8-9岁，N=43）。此外，这项研究引入了响应时间可变性的测量，该测量跟踪整个实验过程中响应时间的波动，除了常规的响应时间分析。结果表明，在重复搜索环境中，所有年龄组的反应都明显快于非重复搜索环境。值得注意的是,成年人和青少年在重复环境中表现出比在非重复环境中更小的响应时间变异性，而年幼的孩子没有。这意味着儿童在将上下文信息整合到稳定的记忆表示中时效率较低，这可能会导致视觉搜索过程中注意力引导不稳定。
