No evidence of unconscious learning in eye-tracking measures of contextual cueing

Résumé fourni par la source

We revisit the longstanding claim that movements of the eyes convey information that the viewer is unaware of. In the contextual cueing task, observers search for a target amongst distractors. Some distractor configurations repeat multiple times, and observers learn to locate the target in these configurations more and more rapidly – a selection history effect. Eye movements monitored in contextual cueing experiments can be analyzed in a wide range of different ways, including number of fixations before target identification, scanpath length, decision time after fixating the target, fixation duration and others. We conducted a meta-analysis on a range of such measures to estimate the contextual cueing effect size for each measure in 31 published studies. We then report an experiment in which the amount of information conveyed in seven eye-movement measures identified in the meta-analysis was compared to the amount available for conscious report and in response times. All measures showed contextual cueing effects. Employing an analytical approach which places direct (awareness) and indirect (eye-tracking) measures on a common scale, the results show that the amount of information conveyed in eye-movement measures never exceeds the amount available to awareness.

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