Positive Emotions Enhance Adaptability to Contextual-Cueing Learning

Abstract: Contextual cueing refers to the global properties of a context or scene used to search for specific objects and regions. Chun and Jiang (1998) found that in a visual search, the reaction time to repeated configurations was shorter than the reaction time to newly generated configurations. The benefit of repeated context–target association is widely known as the contextual-cueing effect, which indicates that the subject has learned the contextual association by which attention is guided to facilitate the searching. However, the learning of contextual cueing lacks adaptability. When the subject has learned a set of contexts, it is difficult to update a new target into existing contexts (re-learning) or to learn a new set of contexts (new-learning). Previous studies have shown that restarted learning processes can facilitate the learning of new context–target associations, while updating old contexts is associated with the scope of attention. Notably, positive emotions could broaden the scope of attention and break the cognitive fixation on old processes; therefore, it is possible to improve the adaptability of contextual-cueing learning via positive emotions. 

This study aimed to explore whether positive emotions could enhance the adaptability of contextual learning. To this end, we recruited a sample of 18 young adults with positive and neutral affective priming as experimental conditions and control conditions, respectively, which allowed us to explore the contextual-cueing effect under the conditions of re-learning and new-learning. It should be noted that contextual cueing was defined in operation as the reaction time to the newly generated configuration minus that to the repeated configuration.

The experiment was divided into two phases: the learning phase and the switch phase. In the learning phase, the subjects learned a set of contextual cues. In the switch phase, with the contextual-cueing effect as the dependent variable, a repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with the emotional valence (positive versus neutral), the new contextual-cueing learning type (re-learning versus new-learning), and the time phase (early phase versus late phase).

The results indicated that neutral emotions did not facilitate contextual-cueing learning irrespective of the new contextual-cueing learning type. However, positive emotion improved learning in the new-learning condition, in which the contextual-cueing effect was higher in positive emotions than in neutral emotions both in the late phase and the early phase, whereas the re-learning condition did not show any sign of a contextual-cueing effect above zero.

This study indicates that positive emotions can improve the adaptability of contextual-cueing learning and that the underlying mechanism restarts learning processing, which fails to prevent an automatic retrieval of the old presentations caused by similarity. Therefore, it facilitates the learning of new contextual cueing but does not update learned contextual cueing.