Abstract:

Contextual cueing refers to the global properties of a context or scene used to search for specific objects and regions. Chun and Jiang (1998) found that in a visual search, the reaction time to repeated configurations was shorter than the reaction time to newly generated configurations. The benefit of repeated context-target association is widely known as the contextual-cueing effect, which indicates that the subject has learned the contextual association by which attention is guided to facilitate the searching. However, the learning of contextual cueing lacks adaptability. When the subject has learned a set of contexts, it is difficult to update a new target into existing contexts (re-learning) or to learn a new set of contexts (new-learning). Previous studies have shown that restarted learning processes can facilitate the learning of new context-target associations, while updating old contexts is associated with the scope of attention. Notably, positive emotions could broaden the scope of attention and break the cognitive fixation on old processes; therefore, it is possible to improve the adaptability of contextual-cueing learning via positive emotions.
This study aimed to explore whether positive emotions could enhance the adaptability of contextual learning. To this end, we recruited a sample of 18 young adults with positive and neutral affective priming as experimental conditions and control conditions, respectively, which allowed us to explore the contextual-cueing effect under the conditions of re-learning and new-learning, the examples of re-learning and new-learning condition is shown in Figure 1, and the experimental procedure is shown in Figure 2. It should be noted that contextual cueing was defined in operation as the reaction time to the newly generated configuration minus that to the repeated configuration.
The experiment was divided into two phases: the learning phase and the switch phase (Figure 2). In Initial learning phase, subjects learned the repeated context-target associations in 3 epochs. A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with the configuration (novel versus repeated) and the time phase (Epoch 1~3), found main effects of configuration (F(1, 17) = 46.76, p < 0.001, η² = 0.73), time phase (F(2, 34) = 22.87, p < 0.001) statistically significant, as well as the interactions between them(F(2, 34) = 4.00, p = 0.028, η² = 0.19). In post-hoc analyses, we found significant differences between configurations in every epoch. The results are shown in the Table 1 and Figure 3.
In the switch phase, the average CC and standard deviation were shown in Table 2. With the contextual-cueing effect as the dependent variable, a repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with the emotional valence (positive versus neutral), the new contextual-cueing learning type (re-learning versus new-learning), and the time phase (early phase versus late phase). It was found that the main effects of learning type (F(1, 17) = 4.57, p = 0.047, η² = 0.21) and time phase (F(1, 17) = 5.01, p = 0.039, η² = 0.23) were significant, but emotional valence (F(1, 17) = 4.31, p = 0.053) was not. The interaction among the three factors was not significant (F(1, 17) = 0.08, p = 0.783), so were emotional valence × time phase (F(1, 17) = 1.86, p = 0.191) and learning type × time phase (F(1, 17) = 4.35, p = 0.053), but the interaction between emotional valence and learning type was significant, F(1, 17) = 4.55, p = 0.048, η² = 0.21. Post-hoc analyses indicated that positive emotion only improved learning in the new-learning condition, in which the contextual-cueing effect was statistically higher in positive emotions than in neutral emotions in the late phase (Table 3 and Figure 4).
This study indicates that positive emotions can improve the adaptability of contextual-cueing learning and that the underlying mechanism is to restart the learning processing, which fails to prevent an automatic retrieval of the old presentations caused by similarity. Therefore, it facilitates the learning of new contextual cueing but does not update learned contextual cueing.

Key words: context cueing, positive emotion, affective priming, visual search