Abstract
The present study used a contextual cueing paradigm to investigate contextual information in a complex visual scene which changed dynamically. An observer had to track five identical targets which moved independently and unpredictably among five identical distractors (a multiple object tracking task). The motion patterns (trajectories) of the items were made invariant by repeating them throughout the entire experimental session. The results showed that repetition of the target motion pattern facilitated the tracking performance. A more important finding was that repeating the motion pattern of the distractor resulted in greater facilitation. An incidental recognition test confirmed that an observer could not notice the repetition procedure. We conclude that not only the target motion pattern, but also the distractor motion pattern, was encoded as contextual information in an implicit manner.
