Downloaded By: [University of Edinburgh] At: 14:35 16 January 2008 The role of meaning in contextual cueing:
Evidence from chess expertise
James R. Brockmole
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
David Z. Hambrick
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
David J. Windisch and John M. Henderson
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
In contextual cueing, the position of a search target is learned over repeated exposures to a visual
display. The strength of this effect varies across stimulus types. For example, real-world scene contexts
give rise to larger search benefits than contexts composed of letters or shapes. We investigated whether
such differences in learning can be at least partially explained by the degree of semantic meaning
associated with a context independently of the nature of the visual information available (which
also varies across stimulus types). Chess boards served as the learning context as their meaningfulness
depends on the observer’s knowledge of the game. In Experiment 1, boards depicted actual game play,
and search benefits for repeated boards were 4 times greater for experts than for novices. In
Experiment 2, search benefits among experts were halved when less meaningful randomly generated
boards were used. Thus, stimulus meaningfulness independently contributes to learning context–
target associations.
Keywords: Contextual cueing; Visual memory; Chess; Expertise; Semantic memory.
Contextual cueing is a learning effect where
repeated exposure to a specific arrangement of
target and distractor items leads to a progressively
more efficient search. In these learning paradigms,
intermixed among novel displays, a subset of
stimuli are consistently repeated where the pos-
itions of the target and other objects in the
display are fixed. Over repetitions, this covariation
is learned and used to guide visual attention,
causing search times for repeated displays to pro-
gressively decrease at a faster rate than for novel
displays (which often improve as the search task
becomes more famil