Sensory Cue - Environmental Cues

Environmental cues are all of the sensory cues that exist in the environment.

With directed attention an environmental cue becomes an attended cue. However, most environmental cues are assimilated subconsciously, as in visual contextual cuing.

Environmental cues serve as the primary context that shapes how the world is perceived and as such they can prime prior experience to influence memory recall and decision making. This has applied use in marketing as there is evidence to suggest a store's atmosphere and layout can influence purchasing behavior.

Environmental cues play a direct role in mediating the behavior of both plants and animals. For example, environmental cues, such as temperature change or food availability affect the spawning behavior of fish. In addition to cues generated by the environment itself, cues generated by other agents, such as ant pheromone trails, can influence behavior to indirectly coordinate actions between those agents.

In the study of perception environmental cues play a large role in experimental design since these mechanisms evolved within a natural environment which gives rise to scene statistics and the desire to create a natural scene. If the experimental environment is too artificial it can damage external validity in an ideal observer experiment that makes use of natural scene statistics.