2021 Volume 39 Issue 2 Pages 165-181
Even as viewpoint changes with eye movements, postural changes, or self-motions, we perceive the world as stable based on the visual system’s environmental coordinate representation. It remains unclear which coordinate system is responsible for the contextual cueing effect, an implicit learning phenomenon for spatial arrangements. We investigated whether the contextual cueing effect is based on the environmental coordinate system or the body coordinate system when posture changes around the roll axis before and after learning. In our experiment, body position was changed between sitting and lying on one’s side before and after learning a task involving repeated visual search. The learning effect remained when the arrangement of objects was matched to the body coordinate system. Furthermore, we evaluated whether a natural image presented as a background could enhance the effect of the environmental coordinate system because it gives the spatial cue of the environment. The contextual cues that matched environmental coordinates were not used even if there is a background image; it is important that the background and contextual cues are matched to body coordinates in the learning and test phases.
