The Allocentric Reference System Impacts Contextual Cuing Effect

In visual search tasks, the combination of target and a fixed background will significantly increase the search efficiency in the scene, this phenomenon is called contextual cuing effects. Meanwhile, participants were mostly unaware that configurations were repeated over time, therefore the contextual cuing effects was seen as a type of implicit memory. The effect is a classic paradigm of implicit spatial memory areas,but the there are few research concerned about how the spital relationship in the context is encoded. It has been proposed that the implicit memory trace for contextual information account for instance-based theory, this interpretation is equivalent to the egocentric reference system in the explicit learning of scene perception.People must use the spatial reference system to define a position of object There are two kind of reference frames, egocentric reference systems and allocentric reference systems. Egocentric reference system believes that the object position is defined by the relation between the object and the observer, which requires real-time updating of spatial relationship in information encoding and is a primitive way of spatial representation. While allocentric reference systems propose that the object position is defined by the objective relation around the environment,which is an abstract representation of objects and relationships between objects and a flexible advanced spatial representation methods.Allocentric reference system has been demonstrated works well in many conditions only with the explicit memory task. So the contextual cuing effect is employed in this study to test whether the implicit memory could draw support from allocentric reference systemThis study includes the following three experiments:The purpose of the experiment1was to explore whether allocentric information could be used in the contextual cuing effect., experiment using3-D real scene as experimental material, and was designed as2(scene type:repetition, novel) x6(learn epoch:1～6)×3(intrinsic axis control: front, side, random). It was found that the effect is not encoded as the " snapshots ",and there would be advanced process type in contextual cuing effect..The purpose of the experiment2was to test whether a intrinsic reference frame can improve the effect of contextual cuing.. The experiment2conducted a2(scene type:repetition, novel)×6(learn epoch:1～6)×3(intrinsic axis control: with,without) design. It was found that with the help of intrinsic reference frame, participants were able to acquire context clues in earlier experimental stage. The purpose of the experiment3was to examine whether a environmental reference frame can improve the effect of contextual cuing.. The experiment3conducted a2(scene type:repetition, novel)×7(learn epoch:1～7) x3(intrinsic axis control: with,without) design. It was found that there is no advantage with the aid of environmental reference frame.Under the conditions of this study, the conclusions as follow:(1) Contextual cuing effects is not based on the "snapshot" from in encode processing(2) The spatial encoding of contextual cluing effects can be improved with the aid of intrinsic reference frame.(3) Contextual cluing effects cannot benefit from the environmental reference frame.