Stefan Pollmann - Spatial Learning and Attention Guidance

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Human behavior depends to a large degree on spatial learning. This is obvious when we search for an object, explore a scene or navigate an environment. Research on these topics has asked how visual search can be guided by both short-term and long-term memory, often gained by implicit learning. Recent experiences influence where we look, in the form of priming. However, repeated spatial configurations can also lead to long-lasting improvements of search. What is learned is often of a statistical, probabilistic nature. The search improvements manifest themselves in reduced search times, and also in more efficient gaze paths. Eye movements are important both for encoding environmental aspects into memory and for making use of learned spatial patterns for efficient search. While these processes are mostly implicit, spatial memory is often explicit, e.g., when we hold information in working memory for an ongoing task. Working memory, in turn, interacts with long-term memory and is increasingly seen as an activated part of long-term memory.

The neural code of spatial learning and memory has been intensively investigated in the recent years. In particular, the storage and manipulation of information in working memory are currently an intense focus of research. Novel EEG and MEG analysis methods yield insights in the processes of memory storage, whereas both structural and functional MR methods enable fine-grained analyses of the functional neuroanatomy of spatial learning and memory.

The chapters in this volume treat both well-established andin the majorityvery recent methods. The former have been included because of their widespread use and the latter because of their potential for future use across the field of spatial learning and attention guidance. While some of the methods have been described in dedicated papers, to my knowledge there is no comparable collection of methods in a single volume.

This book is divided into three partsbehavioral, psychophysiological, and functional neuroimaging methods. The chapters in Part I focus on different aspects of visual search. Kristjansson and colleagues discuss visual foraging methods. While classical visual search paradigms are about finding a single target in a search display, visual foraging is about finding many targets in a display or scene. This allows more dynamic search tasks that capture search processes that are not typically seen in classical search tasks. Visual search involves eye movements. The measurement of eye movements has become more and more tractable over the years, so that eye movement recordings are now an important source of data that not only inform us about the total duration of search, like reaction times, but also enable us to investigate attentional strategies that occur during search. Hollingworth and Bahle give an overview of paradigms and methods of eye tracking in visual search. Visual search is affected by priming. Chetverikov and colleagues present a new method to analyze the effects of feature distributions in the search history on the internal representation of visual ensembles. Contextual cueing allows to investigate the impact of implicitly learned spatial contexts on memory-guided search. The chapter by Jiang and Sisk provides a methodological guide on the experimental paradigm of contextual cueing and reviews key findings. In addition, Marek and Pollmann present a virtual reality environment for contextual cueing experiments.