Visual attention modulates perception by selecting a subset of incoming stimuli for enhanced processing. The cueing paradigm, originally introduced by Posner (1980) to investigate visual attention, reliably produces faster reaction times (RT) on valid compared to invalid trials, a phenomenon known as the "cueing effect" of attention. However, most prior research employing this paradigm has used symbolic stimuli, raising questions about its ecological validity. Natural scenes differ fundamentally from symbolic stimuli in that they contain low-level image statistics enabling rapid, gist-based processing that may partially bypass focal attention. 

The present study examined whether a RT and accuracy cueing effect is present for naturalistic stimuli, and whether effect magnitude differs between symbolic and naturalistic conditions. Twenty-seven participants (aged 18–35) completed a modified Posner cueing paradigm across five stimulus types: symbolic fixed, symbolic varied, cut-out natural fixed, cut-out natural varied, and full natural stimuli, presented on a monitor with eye-tracking. Results showed a significant RT cueing effect for all stimulus types except the full natural condition. 

Between-stimulus-type analyses revealed a significant main effect of stimulus type on RT, but no significant interaction between cueing condition and stimulus type. No significant accuracy cueing effects were found for any stimulus type. These findings suggest that the RT cueing effect is robust across symbolic and cut-out natural stimuli but does not extend to full naturalistic scenes, consistent with the hypothesis that gist-based scene processing reduces the unique contribution of spatial cueing to target detection.