Abstract: During visual search, humans are able to improve their search performance through learning constant associations among the targets and the scenes in which the targets are typically presented in, that is, contextual cueing effect. This study used high-frequency (contains rich semantic cues) or low-frequency (contains less semantic cues) characters as the visual search item to investigate the role of Chinese characters’ features including, semantic meaning, orthography, and spatial location in contextual learning. In the initial learning session, participants viewed either repeated search displays with both the characters and their locations maintained constant or novel displays with both characters and location varied randomly. In a subsequent test session, either characters or spatial locations were randomly varied to examine whether a change on the semantics or the spatial locations would affect the transfer of the learned contextual cueing effect (if any). The results showed significant contextual learning effects in both experiments. Most importantly, the high-frequency characters that consisted of both semantic and orthographic qualities maintained contextual cueing effects that could be transferred when the spatial location of the characters changed but not when the characters semantics or orthography were changed. In contrast, low-frequency characters that mainly contain orthographic qualities (semantic being too complicated), had a contextual cueing effect that could be transferred when characters changed form (spatial location maintained) but not when spatial location changed (character maintained). The results suggest that the spatial locations are more important than the orthographic context when semantics are less important, but semantic context is the most important when semantics, orthography and spatial location are all presented at the same time. In other words, in Chinese character based contextual learning, semantics plays a dominant role, followed by spatial context and finally orthographic context.

Key words: visual search, contextual cueing effect, Chinese characters’ semantic cues, spatial location cues, glyph feature cues

摘要： 个体通过学习目标−场景联结关系提高搜索速度的现象即为情景线索效应。本研究以高频（包含丰富语义线索）或低频（语义线索少）汉字为实验材料考察语义、字形特征、空间位置线索的作用。结果显示个体可以学习字集−位置重复场景产生情景线索效应，且该效应在改变高频字集的空间线索而非字集线索或改变低频字集线索而非空间线索时可迁移，表明在情景线索学习中，语义线索占据优先地位，其次是空间线索，最后是字形特征线索。

关键词: 视觉搜索, 情景线索效应, 汉字语义线索, 空间位置线索, 字形特征线索