Categorical Cuing: Object Categories Structure the Acquisition of Statistical Regularities to Guide Visual Search

Recent statistical regularities have been demonstrated to influence visual search across a wide variety of learning mechanisms and search features. To function in the guidance of real-world search, however, such learning must be contingent on the context in which the search occurs and the object that is the target of search. The former has been studied extensively under the rubric of contextual cuing. Here, we examined, for the first time, categorical cuing: The role of object categories in structuring the acquisition of statistical regularities used to guide visual search. After an exposure session in which participants viewed six exemplars with the same general color in each of 40 different real-world categories, they completed a categorical search task, in which they searched for any member of a category based on a label cue. Targets that matched recent within-category regularities were found faster than targets that did not (Experiment 1). Such categorical cuing was also found to span multiple recent colors within a category (Experiment 2). It was observed to influence both the guidance of search to the target object (Experiment 3) and the basic operation of assigning single exemplars to categories (Experiment 4). Finally, the rapid acquisition of category-specific regularities was also quickly modified, with the benefit rapidly decreasing during the search session as participants were exposed equally to the two possible colors in each category. The results demonstrate that object categories organize the acquisition of perceptual regularities and that this learning exerts strong control over the instantiation of the category representation as a template for visual search.