Contextual cueing effects of various targets in the same context

People find targets faster in repeated contexts than in novel ones (contextual cueing; Chun & Jiang, 1998). Previous studies showed that learning a new target location in old contexts was difficult (Manginelli & Pollmann, 2009; Zellin et al., 2014) and that only one target location could be learned in each context (Zellin et al., 2011). However, the identity of the target was the same in these studies. Here, we investigated whether a target with a new identity enabled people to learn a new target location in learned contexts (Experiment 1) and whether the old target information in the same context was preserved after learning a new target location (Experiment 2). We used real-object images to give a distinctive identity to each stimulus. In Experiment 1, there were two phases with two different targets but with the same contexts. The task was to click the target object among 16 objects using a mouse. Participants did not know the target identity of each phase until the beginning of each phase. The locations of objects were maintained throughout the experiment in repeated contexts, whereas the locations of the distractors were randomly changed in each trial in novel contexts. We found significant contextual cueing effects in both phases suggesting that participants learned a new target location in the same context. In Experiment 2, to test whether the old target information in the first phase could still facilitate search after the second phase, we added a test phase to the end of the second phase. The target identity of the test phase was the same as in the first phase. We replicated the result of Experiment 1 and found contextual cueing effects in the test phase as well. Thus, people can learn different target locations associated with the same context if targets are different.