No exploitation of temporal sequence context during visual search

The human visual system can rapidly extract regularities from our visual environment, generating predictive context. It has been shown that spatial predictive context can be used during visual search. We set out to see whether observers can additionally exploit temporal predictive context based on sequence order, using an extended version of a contextual cueing paradigm. Though we replicated the contextual cueing effect, repeating search scenes in a structured order versus a random order yielded no additional behavioural benefit. This was also true when we looked specifically at participants who revealed a sensitivity to spatial predictive context. We argue that spatial predictive context during visual search is more readily learned and subsequently exploited than temporal predictive context, potentially rendering the latter redundant. In conclusion, unlike spatial context, temporal context is not automatically extracted and used during visual search.

repeated distractor and target locations; and (4) repeated order of 6 trials with repeated target locations (but not distractor locations). This paper investigates an interesting question and is well-designed. I like this study, and I think the writing is strong: the introduction in particular is highly focused, which makes it easy to grap the point of the study (with some minor exceptions I mention below), and the general discussion covers the relevant literature well. My concerns with this version of the study deal primarily with the analyses and some of the theoretical interpretation, both of which I think could be greatly improved with a revision to this submission.
I think your analysis of individual differences is inappropriate. By combining Old-ro and Old-so trials and comparing to New, then analyzing the difference within participants who show no Old vs. New difference, you are ensuring that on average participants in the "no contextual cueing" group show no Old-ro versus Old-so difference. The only way for them to show no Old vs New difference but a difference between Old-ro and Old-so is if one of these two Old conditions is worse than the new condition, something there is (to my knowledge) no theoretical reason to expect-this would only be due to noise. Therefore, I don't think this test can appropriately assess whether participants who don't show standard contextual cueing will show an advantage of repeating temporal context. Rather, you might us correlational analyses similar to those you show in Fig 3. For instance, you could compute the standard CC effect (Old-ro -New) and plot this against the Old-so effect (e.g., Old-ro -Old-so), which as far as I can tell avoids the concern I mention above. This is only one suggestion: there may be other, more appropriate ways to conduct these individual difference analyses. However, I do feel that a different approach to the one currently used is necessary. 2.
Throughout the paper, I think you can be more precise regarding what your findings say about temporal predictability. The introduction seems to inconsistently discuss the effects of temporal predictability on visual search in general and the interaction between spatial and temporal predictability. I think revision of the last couple paragraphs of the introduction to lay out the fact that your experiment fully crosses manipulations of temporal predictability of targets (albeit target locations) with spatial predictability of entire search arrays. My impression is that you are addressing two interesting questions: (1) will temporal predictability help (in which case Targ-so condition should be faster than New and (2) will temporal predictability help when also in the presence of spatial predictability (Old-so faster than Old-ro). As currently written, your preview of the results makes it sound like you are only testing (2) and based on it concluding that temporal predictability is not useful in your task, while in reality you do present marginal evidence that temporal predictability is useful relative to no predictability, just that it is redundant with spatial predictability.
P4: the paragraph beginning "to investigate temporal" would benefit from a brief discussion of whether these past studies do or don't find effects. 4.
P5: I have no specific concerns about the encouragement that participants not move their eyes, but I do wonder why this was enforced in displays that were visible for a reasonably long time (2.5s), at least enough to make several saccades. Particularly because stimuli were not scaled with distance, this choice surprised me. 5.
P6: I don't believe the manuscript mentions the cutoff for "too late" trials, which might be good to include 6.
P6: How do you think restricting target locations to between 6-8 degrees of eccentricity affects your results? Doing so is similar to making targets appear more often in one quadrant of a display (only for a ring of locations around fixation), something which has been shown to speed responses to targets within versus outside the ring (Druker & Anderson, 2010, Frontiers in Human Neuro.). This isn't a confound-your results still report standard CC despite this change from many CC studies-but I wonder if your results might change without that restriction in target locations (e.g., participants may be consciously guiding attention to the range of locations that could contain targets, making other implicit effects of attention less effective than if participants weren't engaging goal-driven attention; cf. Jiang, Swallow, & Rosenbaum, 2013, Guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning and endogenous cueing, JEP:HPP). 7.
P7: It took me a long time to learn which condition names were associated with which conditions, so you might consider renaming them to something more intuitive (e.g., old-random, old-structured, target-structured, and new, or similar). 8.
P8: Your log-transforming of all RT data together, rather than separately within each condition (and perhaps within each subject and condition), may be inappropriate. Could you explain your reasoning behind log-transforming all RT data independent of condition given the possibility that these data can be viewed as coming from different distributions assuming you do have an effect of condition? 9.
P9: Fig 2a says the reported RT data is smoothed but not how this smoothing is performed. It would be good to state this. 10.
P9: To be consistent, it would be good to report effect sizes for F tests as well as t-tests throughout. 11. P11: Related to my point about the discussion at the end of your introduction, I don't think your results indicate that "there is no effect of temporal predictive context in our experiment," but that "there is no effect of adding temporal predictive context to spatial predictive context in our experiment." 12.
Do you think your results for the Targ-so condition would differ if the absolute serial order of target locations remained constant within each block (e.g., an experiment with the same sequence of target locations throughout an entire block)? I wonder if the need to identify when this sequence begins makes it very difficult to pick up on and/or guide attention based on this predictability. 13.
P15: I recommend incorporating a discussion of Vadillo, Konstantinidis, and Shanks (2016, PBR) in your discussion of statistical power for explicit recognition tests, as it deals specifically with this question for contextual cueing tasks. This is only a suggestion.

Decision letter (RSOS-201565.R0)
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Dear Ms Bouwkamp
The Editors assigned to your paper RSOS-201565 "No exploitation of temporal predictive context during visual search" have now received comments from reviewers and would like you to revise the paper in accordance with the reviewer comments and any comments from the Editors. Please note this decision does not guarantee eventual acceptance.
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Please submit your revised manuscript and required files (see below) no later than 21 days from today's (ie 20-Nov-2020) date. Note: the ScholarOne system will 'lock' if submission of the revision is attempted 21 or more days after the deadline. If you do not think you will be able to meet this deadline please contact the editorial office immediately.
Please note article processing charges apply to papers accepted for publication in Royal Society Open Science (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/charges). Charges will also apply to papers transferred to the journal from other Royal Society Publishing journals, as well as papers submitted as part of our collaboration with the Royal Society of Chemistry (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/chemistry). Fee waivers are available but must be requested when you submit your revision (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/waivers). Comments to the Author(s) This study aims at investigating the effect of temporal regularities of events on human behavior. Using a modified version of the classic spatial contextual cueing paradigm, they show that temporal context -manipulated as the predictive order of search arrays -does not modulate response times. The experiment design and data analysis are carefully conducted, and the findings are unquestionably relevant to the field. I have only a data analysis suggestion and a more general comment. A possible limitation of their analysis is that it's not possible to know when -within each subblock -the temporal context would kick in. The authors somewhat acknowledge that, by excluding the first trial of each sub-block. However, I believe that there are better ways to deal with this potential problem. The simplest one would be to analyze RT performance separately for each display repetition (1 to 6). The other, perhaps more sensitive approach, would be to perform a regression analysis using the order as a predictor. As a more general comment, the authors should be a bit more careful when they generalize their findings. Temporal context is an extremely broad concept, and I don't believe that a manipulation of the sequence order of events is enough to state that temporal context is not exploited, or extracted, during visual search. One of the original papers in this area (Olson and Chun, 2001), already noted the intricacies of the term: "Temporal structure can be divided into two time-based variables: (a) a sequential or ordinal variable and (b) a duration or rhythm-based variable." (pg. 1301). Therefore, I would strongly suggest to the authors to be more specific about the type of temporal prediction they investigated (sequence order) -including in the title and abstract.

Reviewer: 2
Comments to the Author(s) Summary: This paper reports an experiment on the relationship between spatial and temporal predictive information in visual search. Participants did a T-among-L search task that had 4 conditions (across sub-blocks): (1) random order and configuration of all search items; (2) random order of 6 trials with repeated target and distractor locations; (3) repeated order of 6 trials with repeated distractor and target locations; and (4) repeated order of 6 trials with repeated target locations (but not distractor locations). This paper investigates an interesting question and is well-designed. I like this study, and I think the writing is strong: the introduction in particular is highly focused, which makes it easy to grap the point of the study (with some minor exceptions I mention below), and the general discussion covers the relevant literature well. My concerns with this version of the study deal primarily with the analyses and some of the theoretical interpretation, both of which I think could be greatly improved with a revision to this submission.
Major Points: 1. I think your analysis of individual differences is inappropriate. By combining Old-ro and Oldso trials and comparing to New, then analyzing the difference within participants who show no Old vs. New difference, you are ensuring that on average participants in the "no contextual cueing" group show no Old-ro versus Old-so difference. The only way for them to show no Old vs New difference but a difference between Old-ro and Old-so is if one of these two Old conditions is worse than the new condition, something there is (to my knowledge) no theoretical reason to expect-this would only be due to noise. Therefore, I don't think this test can appropriately assess whether participants who don't show standard contextual cueing will show an advantage of repeating temporal context. Rather, you might us correlational analyses similar to those you show in Fig 3. For instance, you could compute the standard CC effect (Old-ro -New) and plot this against the Old-so effect (e.g., Old-ro -Old-so), which as far as I can tell avoids the concern I mention above. This is only one suggestion: there may be other, more appropriate ways to conduct these individual difference analyses. However, I do feel that a different approach to the one currently used is necessary. 2. Throughout the paper, I think you can be more precise regarding what your findings say about temporal predictability. The introduction seems to inconsistently discuss the effects of temporal predictability on visual search in general and the interaction between spatial and temporal predictability. I think revision of the last couple paragraphs of the introduction to lay out the fact that your experiment fully crosses manipulations of temporal predictability of targets (albeit target locations) with spatial predictability of entire search arrays. My impression is that you are addressing two interesting questions: (1) will temporal predictability help (in which case Targ-so condition should be faster than New and (2) will temporal predictability help when also in the presence of spatial predictability (Old-so faster than Old-ro). As currently written, your preview of the results makes it sound like you are only testing (2) and based on it concluding that temporal predictability is not useful in your task, while in reality you do present marginal evidence that temporal predictability is useful relative to no predictability, just that it is redundant with spatial predictability.
Minor points: 3. P4: the paragraph beginning "to investigate temporal" would benefit from a brief discussion of whether these past studies do or don't find effects. 4. P5: I have no specific concerns about the encouragement that participants not move their eyes, but I do wonder why this was enforced in displays that were visible for a reasonably long time (2.5s), at least enough to make several saccades. Particularly because stimuli were not scaled with distance, this choice surprised me. 5. P6: I don't believe the manuscript mentions the cutoff for "too late" trials, which might be good to include 6. P6: How do you think restricting target locations to between 6-8 degrees of eccentricity affects your results? Doing so is similar to making targets appear more often in one quadrant of a display (only for a ring of locations around fixation), something which has been shown to speed responses to targets within versus outside the ring (Druker & Anderson, 2010, Frontiers in Human Neuro.). This isn't a confound-your results still report standard CC despite this change from many CC studies-but I wonder if your results might change without that restriction in target locations (e.g., participants may be consciously guiding attention to the range of locations that could contain targets, making other implicit effects of attention less effective than if participants weren't engaging goal-driven attention; cf. Jiang, Swallow, & Rosenbaum, 2013, Guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning and endogenous cueing, JEP:HPP). 7. P7: It took me a long time to learn which condition names were associated with which conditions, so you might consider renaming them to something more intuitive (e.g., old-random, old-structured, target-structured, and new, or similar). 8. P8: Your log-transforming of all RT data together, rather than separately within each condition (and perhaps within each subject and condition), may be inappropriate. Could you explain your reasoning behind log-transforming all RT data independent of condition given the possibility that these data can be viewed as coming from different distributions assuming you do have an effect of condition? 9. P9: Fig 2a says the reported RT data is smoothed but not how this smoothing is performed. It would be good to state this. 10. P9: To be consistent, it would be good to report effect sizes for F tests as well as t-tests throughout. 11. P11: Related to my point about the discussion at the end of your introduction, I don't think your results indicate that "there is no effect of temporal predictive context in our experiment," but that "there is no effect of adding temporal predictive context to spatial predictive context in our experiment." 12. Do you think your results for the Targ-so condition would differ if the absolute serial order of target locations remained constant within each block (e.g., an experiment with the same sequence of target locations throughout an entire block)? I wonder if the need to identify when this sequence begins makes it very difficult to pick up on and/or guide attention based on this predictability. 13. P15: I recommend incorporating a discussion of Vadillo, Konstantinidis, and Shanks (2016, PBR) in your discussion of statistical power for explicit recognition tests, as it deals specifically with this question for contextual cueing tasks. This is only a suggestion.

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Do you have any ethical concerns with this paper? No
Have you any concerns about statistical analyses in this paper? No

Recommendation?
Accept with minor revision (please list in comments)

Comments to the Author(s)
The authors have done an outstanding job in revising this paper and I think it would make a good contribution to Royal Society Open Science. I have only one minor comment. p41: In line with revisions you've already made elsewhere (e.g., p36), I think the claim that "temporal predictive context is not exploited when locating a target in a complex scene using a typical visual search task" is not supported by your design; instead, it needs to be clarified that the Old-random vs Old-structured comparison shows the lack of this exploitation when spatial predictive context is also present.

Decision letter (RSOS-201565.R1)
The editorial office reopened on 4 January 2021. We are working hard to catch up after the festive break. If you need advice or an extension to a deadline, please do not hesitate to let us know --we will continue to be as flexible as possible to accommodate the changing COVID situation. We wish you a happy New Year, and hope 2021 proves to be a better year for everyone.

Dear Ms Bouwkamp
On behalf of the Editors, we are pleased to inform you that your Manuscript RSOS-201565.R1 "No exploitation of temporal sequence context during visual search" has been accepted for publication in Royal Society Open Science subject to minor revision in accordance with the referees' reports. Please find the referees' comments along with any feedback from the Editors below my signature.
We invite you to respond to the comments and revise your manuscript. Below the referees' and Editors' comments (where applicable) we provide additional requirements. Final acceptance of your manuscript is dependent on these requirements being met. We provide guidance below to help you prepare your revision.
Please submit your revised manuscript and required files (see below) no later than 7 days from today's (ie 12-Jan-2021) date. Note: the ScholarOne system will 'lock' if submission of the revision is attempted 7 or more days after the deadline. If you do not think you will be able to meet this deadline please contact the editorial office immediately.
Please note article processing charges apply to papers accepted for publication in Royal Society Open Science (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/charges). Charges will also apply to papers transferred to the journal from other Royal Society Publishing journals, as well as papers submitted as part of our collaboration with the Royal Society of Chemistry (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/chemistry). Fee waivers are available but must be requested when you submit your revision (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/waivers). Comments to the Author(s) The authors have done an outstanding job in revising this paper and I think it would make a good contribution to Royal Society Open Science. I have only one minor comment. p41: In line with revisions you've already made elsewhere (e.g., p36), I think the claim that "temporal predictive context is not exploited when locating a target in a complex scene using a typical visual search task" is not supported by your design; instead, it needs to be clarified that the Old-random vs Old-structured comparison shows the lack of this exploitation when spatial predictive context is also present.

===PREPARING YOUR MANUSCRIPT===
Your revised paper should include the changes requested by the referees and Editors of your manuscript. You should provide two versions of this manuscript and both versions must be provided in an editable format: one version identifying all the changes that have been made (for instance, in coloured highlight, in bold text, or tracked changes); a 'clean' version of the new manuscript that incorporates the changes made, but does not highlight them. This version will be used for typesetting. Please ensure that any equations included in the paper are editable text and not embedded images.
Please ensure that you include an acknowledgements' section before your reference list/bibliography. This should acknowledge anyone who assisted with your work, but does not qualify as an author per the guidelines at https://royalsociety.org/journals/ethicspolicies/openness/.
While not essential, it will speed up the preparation of your manuscript proof if you format your references/bibliography in Vancouver style (please see https://royalsociety.org/journals/authors/author-guidelines/#formatting). You should include DOIs for as many of the references as possible.
If you have been asked to revise the written English in your submission as a condition of publication, you must do so, and you are expected to provide evidence that you have received language editing support. The journal would prefer that you use a professional language editing service and provide a certificate of editing, but a signed letter from a colleague who is a native speaker of English is acceptable. Note the journal has arranged a number of discounts for authors using professional language editing services (https://royalsociety.org/journals/authors/benefits/language-editing/).

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See Appendix B.
Decision letter (RSOS-201565.R2) The editorial office reopened on 4 January 2021. We are working hard to catch up after the festive break. If you need advice or an extension to a deadline, please do not hesitate to let us know --we will continue to be as flexible as possible to accommodate the changing COVID situation. We wish you a happy New Year, and hope 2021 proves to be a better year for everyone.

Dear Ms Bouwkamp,
It is a pleasure to accept your manuscript entitled "No exploitation of temporal sequence context during visual search" in its current form for publication in Royal Society Open Science.
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To the reviewers,
We would like to sincerely thank the reviewers for their positive evaluation of and constructive feedback on our manuscript. We believe this greatly improved the manuscript. Below we answer the questions raised and specify how we implemented suggested changes. Textual changes in the manuscript have been copy-pasted and highlighted in yellow. Page numbers refer to the revised manuscript.

Reviewer: 1
Comments to the Author(s) This study aims at investigating the effect of temporal regularities of events on human behavior. Using a modified version of the classic spatial contextual cueing paradigm, they show that temporal context -manipulated as the predictive order of search arrays -does not modulate response times. The experiment design and data analysis are carefully conducted, and the findings are unquestionably relevant to the field. I have only a data analysis suggestion and a more general comment.
A possible limitation of their analysis is that it's not possible to know when -within each sub-block -the temporal context would kick in. The authors somewhat acknowledge that, by excluding the first trial of each sub-block. However, I believe that there are better ways to deal with this potential problem. The simplest one would be to analyze RT performance separately for each display repetition (1 to 6). The other, perhaps more sensitive approach, would be to perform a regression analysis using the order as a predictor.
Thank you for this suggestion. It is indeed unknown when temporal context would impact behavior. What is certain, however, is that the first display of the sequence cannot be predicted based on the preceding display. That was the rationale for excluding this display from the analyses. It could indeed be that the impact of temporal context on behavior is only visible later in the sequence. To investigate this possibility, we ran an analysis of variance on the Old-so -Old-ro effect per display. More specifically, we preprocessed the data as before, and focused on correct responses in the second half of the experiment to be optimally sensitive to a possible effect of learned predictive context. Per subject, we then calculated the average reaction time per display in the Old-so condition and subtracted the average reaction time of the Old-ro condition across displays. We then ran a One Way Repeated Measures ANOVA with the So-Ro effect as dependent variable and display number as a within subject factor. If the impact of temporal context develops over time, we would expect the So-Ro effect to depend on display number. This is, however not what we find (F5,185 = 0.30, p = 0.91).
Below we plot the RO-SO effect in reaction times for each of the displays.

Appendix A
We hope this extra analysis satisfactorily addresses this point brought up by the reviewer. We added this analysis alongside a similar analysis upon the request of reviewer 2 to the manuscript (p10) : "It might be that temporal predictive context requires time to be recognized, and only impacts reaction time later in the sequence. To examine this possibility, we analyzed the effect of temporal context in structured conditions per display (Old-structured per display versus Old-random overall; Target-structured per display versus New overall). Neither of these effects depended on display number (Old-so F5,185 = 0.30, p = 0.91, and Targ-so F5,185 =1.07 , p = 0.38)." As a more general comment, the authors should be a bit more careful when they generalize their findings. Temporal context is an extremely broad concept, and I don't believe that a manipulation of the sequence order of events is enough to state that temporal context is not exploited, or extracted, during visual search. One of the original papers in this area (Olson and Chun, 2001), already noted the intricacies of the term: "Temporal structure can be divided into two time-based variables: (a) a sequential or ordinal variable and (b) a duration or rhythm-based variable." (pg. 1301). Therefore, I would strongly suggest to the authors to be more specific about the type of temporal prediction they investigated (sequence order) -including in the title and abstract.
We agree with the reviewer that we should have been more specific in our definition of temporal context. Our experimental manipulation of temporal context is based on sequence order, and we have now clarified this in the manuscript. To this end, we adjusted the abstract, introduction and discussion section. The new title of the manuscript is "No exploitation of temporal sequence context during visual search". We also added the following to the discussion (p16): "Our results have implications for how we think about the role of predictive context in visual perception. Though both spatial and temporal context are of importance for visual perception (38), our findings imply that extracting and using context might not be as automatic as previously assumed. In our experiment we find that spatial predictive context is favored. This might be due to a modality-specific bias, leading to a dominance of spatial predictive context in visual perception (39)(40)(41)(42)(43). However, sensitivity to one type of context over the other might also be task-dependent. Additionally, there are other types of temporal context, for instance duration-or rhythm-based (29). These temporal predictive contexts create expectations within the temporal domain itself: when the target will occur, instead of where. These types of temporal context might be exploited more efficiently in addition to spatial predictive context." Reviewer: 2 Comments to the Author(s) Summary: This paper reports an experiment on the relationship between spatial and temporal predictive information in visual search. Participants did a T-among-L search task that had 4 conditions (across sub-blocks): (1) random order and configuration of all search items; (2) random order of 6 trials with repeated target and distractor locations; (3) repeated order of 6 trials with repeated distractor and target locations; and (4) repeated order of 6 trials with repeated target locations (but not distractor locations). This paper investigates an interesting question and is well-designed. I like this study, and I think the writing is strong: the introduction in particular is highly focused, which makes it easy to grasp the point of the study (with some minor exceptions I mention below), and the general discussion covers the relevant literature well. My concerns with this version of the study deal primarily with the analyses and some of the theoretical interpretation, both of which I think could be greatly improved with a revision to this submission.  Fig 3. For instance, you could compute the standard CC effect (Old-ro -New) and plot this against the Old-so effect (e.g., Old-ro -Old-so), which as far as I can tell avoids the concern I mention above. This is only one suggestion: there may be other, more appropriate ways to conduct these individual difference analyses. However, I do feel that a different approach to the one currently used is necessary.
We are thankful for the reviewer for pointing this out. We agree that within the No-contextual cueing group the contrast between Old-ro and Old-so is biased towards finding no effect. In the initial stages of data analysis we ran exactly the correlation analysis suggested by the reviewer, but soon realized that such an analysis will always produce spurious (false) positive results. This is caused by both difference scores (Old-ro -New) and (Old-ro -Old-so) being partly based on data from the same condition (Old-ro). Below a simple matlab simulation and plot based on pure noise demonstrating this issue: %generate three variables with 100 random numbers coming from a normal distribution Old_so = randn(100, 1); Old_ro = randn(100, 1); New = randn ( Thus showing that the suggested analysis is unfortunately not feasible. Importantly, the individual difference analysis was primarily focused on assessing a potential effect of Old-so vs Old-ro within the group that *did* show contextual cueing. As stated in the discussion, our reasoning was as follows (p14): "Our main finding is that sequence-based temporal predictive context was not exploited during our visual search task. It is important to acknowledge that visual search is an inherently spatial task. Even in the temporal predictive context conditions, spatial location(s) predicted spatial location(s) on the next trial. From this, it follows that in order to even detect temporal context, spatial context needs to be processed first. Therefore, perhaps only participants who are sensitive to spatial predictive context, are also sensitive to temporal predictive context." Testing for an Old-so vs Old-ro effect within the contextual cueing group does not suffer from the (conservative) bias identified by the reviewer when testing for this effect within the *no* contextual cueing group. Since the contextual cueing group was the group of interest to begin with, we have now chosen to focus on it exclusively, and have removed the analyses on the no contextual cueing group altogether. (These were presented originally mainly for completeness' sake, but given these issues we agree it is better to omit them.) In the manuscript the paragraph now reads as follows (p14) We appreciate this comment and the viewpoint that we are missing out on an additional interesting research question. We have, however, some reservations that keep us from making the claim that we used a fully crossed design. Furthermore, we are reluctant to claim that our data provide evidence for an effect of temporal predictability without spatial predictability (Targ-so). We initially included the Targ-so condition as a control condition, as discussed on P15: "We included this condition to be able to address the question to what extent a possible effect of temporal predictive context elicited by the entire scene (Old-so) might be due solely to the repetition of the target, independent of the rest of the spatial configuration." As such, we were surprised to find a marginal effect of Targ-so vs New. While considering the most likely interpretation of this effect, we realized that we were restricting possible target locations in all experimental conditions, except New. I.e., on a given trial, the target location would necessarily be drawn from a set of 6 possibilities in Old-ro, Old-so, and Targ-so, whereas it would be drawn from many more possibilities in New. This makes the comparison between Targ-so and New a slightly biased one as people were more likely to encounter a less familiar target location in the New condition. If there is a true effect of Targ-so vs New (for which we have doubts in the first place-see below), we believe the most likely interpretation is an effect of location familiarity (i.e. overall target location probability), rather than of sequence-based temporal predictability.
Relatedly, we therefore cannot claim to have a fully crossed design: replacing the New condition with a Targ-ro condition (with the same restricted set of possible target locations, but with no structured order) would have come closer to such a crossed design. However, in order to facilitate the interpretability of our findings within the broader literature on contextual cueing, we decided to stay relatively close to this literature, in which the typical comparison (in our terms) is between Old-ro and New.
(It should be noted that the potential interpretation we describe above, related to target location familiarity, might also be said to hold for the comparison between Old-ro and New. However, the effect here is of substantial size, while target location familiarity, if at all, maximally contributes only a small effect (as evidenced by the Targ-so vs New contrast). We therefore deem the traditional interpretation of the Old-ro vs New contextual cueing effect in terms of spatial context-based predictability most likely.) We moreover have serious doubts as to whether there is a true effect of Targ-so vs New in the first place. The statistical test of this effect in reaction times had a p-value of 0.05, strictly speaking not crossing the threshold for 'significance' (p < 0.05). Furthermore, Bayesian analysis indicated inconclusive evidence (BF = 1.02). The effect in accuracy was more clearly non-significant (p = 0.17), with anecdotal evidence in favour of the null hypothesis (BF = 0.43). In contrast, for both dependent variables, the effect of spatial predictive context was highly significant, with very strong evidence against the null hypothesis.
Taken together, we are confident about the reported effect of spatial predictive context, but are not convinced (a) that the marginal effect in the Targ-so condition reflects a true effect, rather than a chance finding; and even if it does, (b) that it reflects temporal-order based predictability. This is why the main research question is (p3): "Can observers learn from both spatially predictive and temporally predictive context in visual search?" And our main conclusion is (abstract): "We argue that spatial predictive context during visual search is more readily learned and subsequently exploited than temporal predictive context, potentially rendering the latter redundant." It is not our intention to claim with confidence that there is no effect of temporal predictive context generated by target repetitions in a sequenced order per se, given the uncertainty outlined above, and the fact that our experiment was not specifically designed to test this. This is why we adjusted the discussion about this finding as follows (p15)