The effects of practice on location cueing and visual search.

A target-detection experiment was conducted with 4 inexperienced college students to determine whether or not the magnitude of facilitative location cueing effects would change as a function of practice. Over the course of 5 test sessions, these effects attenuated. This suggests that practice decreases the influence of location cues on visual search performance and attentional processing. The authors propose that when participants perform cued visual search experiments and become familiar with potential target locations as a result of extended practice and automaticity, these locations are encoded in spatial memory by an operation called spatial indexing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)