Overt Attention and Predictiveness in Human Contingency Learning

Le Pelley, M. E.
Beesley, Tom
Griffiths, Oren

¹ School of Psychology, Cardiff University
² Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London
³ School of Psychology, University of New South Wales

Dr M. E. Le Pelley, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Tower Building, Park Place, Cardiff CF10 3AT, United Kingdom [email protected]

Submission April 21, 2010. Revision August 3, 2010. Accepted August 9, 2010.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 37(2):p 220-229, April 2011. | DOI: 10.1037/a0021384

Two experiments used eye-tracking procedures to investigate the relationship between attention and associative learning in human participants. These experiments found greater overt attention to cues experienced as predictive of the outcomes with which they were paired, than to cues experienced as nonpredictive. Moreover, this attentional bias persisted into a second training phase when all cues were equally predictive of the outcomes with which they were paired, and it was accompanied by a related bias in the rate of learning about these cues. These findings are consistent with the attentional model of associative learning proposed by , but not with that proposed by .