Using a combination of behavioral and EEG measures in a tactile odd-one-out search task with collocated visual items, we investigated the mechanisms underlying facilitation of search by repeated (vs. nonrepeated) spatial distractor–target configurations (“contextual cueing”) when either the tactile (same-modality) or the visual array (different-modality) context was predictive of the location of the tactile singleton target. Importantly, in both conditions, the stimulation was multisensory, consisting of tactile plus visual items, although the target was singled out in the tactile modality and so the visual items were task-irrelevant. We found that when the predictive context was tactile, facilitation of search RTs by repeated configurations was accompanied by, and correlated with, enhanced lateralized ERP markers of pre-attentive (N1, N2) and, respectively focal-attentional processing (contralateral delay activity) not only over central (“somatosensory”), but also posterior (“visual”) electrode sites, although the ERP effects were less marked over visual cortex. A similar pattern—of facilitated RTs and enhanced lateralized (N2 and contralateral delay activity) ERP components—was found when the predictive context was visual, although the ERP effects were less marked over somatosensory cortex. These findings indicate that both somatosensory and visual cortical regions contribute to the more efficient processing of the tactile target in repeated stimulus arrays, although their involvement is differentially weighted depending on the sensory modality that contains the predictive information.

This study investigates the causal contribution of the left frontopolar cortex (FPC) to the processing of violated expectations from learned target–distractor spatial contingencies during visual search. The experiment consisted of two phases: learning and test. Participants searched for targets presented either among repeated or nonrepeated target–distractor configurations. Prior research showed that repeated encounters of identically arranged displays lead to memory about these arrays, which then can come to guide search (contextual cueing effect). The crucial manipulation was a change of the target location, in a nevertheless constant distractor layout, at the transition from learning to test. In addition to this change, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the left lateral FPC, over a posterior control site, or no rTMS at all (baseline; between-group manipulation) to see how FPC rTMS influences the ability of observers to adapt context-based memories acquired in the training phase. The learning phase showed expedited search in repeated relative to nonrepeated displays, with this context-based facilitation being comparable across all experimental groups. For the test phase, the recovery of cueing was critically dependent on the stimulation site: Although there was evidence of context adaptation toward the end of the experiment in the occipital and no-rTMS conditions, observers with FPC rTMS showed no evidence of relearning at all after target location changes. This finding shows that FPC plays an important role in the regulation of prediction errors in statistical context learning, thus contributing to an update of the spatial target–distractor contingencies after target position changes in learned spatial arrays.