Justin Frandsen¹, Brian Anderson¹; ¹Texas A&M University

Relationships between objects and their locations (e.g., clock on the wall, pot near the stove) can be used to guide attention in visual search through naturalistic scenes. Due to these associations being formed throughout the lifespan, the mechanisms that underlie the development of such learning-dependent attentional guidance are unclear. By pairing arbitrary stimuli, for which participants lack semantic knowledge, with locations in scenes, unique insights can be gained concerning the role of experience in scene-based attentional guidance. Previous work found that associations between arbitrary shapes (objects without semantic information) and location could be formed via statistical learning mechanisms. This was done by associating a given shape with a region of the scene (i.e., wall, counter, floor) where it would most likely appear over trials. It was found that search was faster when the target appeared in the high-probability location relative to a low-probability location. In the current study, we tested whether this learning was context-dependent. We used three scene categories (kitchen, bathroom, living room) and three arbitrary shapes with different location associations in each scene category. Specifically, each shape was associated with a different region (wall, counter, floor) in each category of scene, with 75% contingency. While eye position was tracked, participants were cued to search for one of the three target shapes in a subsequently presented scene, where they would respond via keypress to the orientation of a small T within the shape. Results showed no effect of when the target appeared in the associated high-probability location relative to an unassociated low-probability location. This suggests that the learning of the object-location relationships that guide attention is not dependent upon context and rather occurs in a context-general manner across categories of scenes.