Implicit learning of social information in contextual cueing.

Abstract

Human attention is often guided by contextual cues that signal where or how to focus in complex environments. Research on object contextual cueing has largely emphasized spatial regularities, but it remains unclear whether socially meaningful information can also provide such guidance. Across three experiments using face stimuli, we examined whether social cues can serve as contextual cues independently of spatial arrangements. In all experiments, participants searched for a target face among distractor faces, with spatial configurations fully randomized on every trial, and contextual information was defined by different types of social mappings. In Experiment 1, the cue was defined by consistent associations between a target identity and a specific set of distractor identities. In Experiment 2, the cue was the overall mood, quantified as the ratio of angry to happy faces. In Experiment 3, the cue was relational information, specifically facing-direction patterns within pairs of profile-view faces. Performance under Consistent Mapping conditions was compared with Variable Mapping conditions, in which these social regularities changed across trials. Bayesian analyses revealed reliable contextual cueing effects across all three experiments, with faster responses under Consistent than Variable Mapping conditions. The effect was strongest in Experiment 2, suggesting that global social cues may be encoded more efficiently than local relational cues. Post-experiment awareness tests indicated minimal explicit knowledge and no reliable association between awareness measures and contextual cueing. Together, these findings suggest that socially meaningful relational structure can provide stable predictive information that supports object-based contextual learning even when spatial regularities are absent.