Extremely Selective Attention

Eye-Tracking Studies of the Dynamic Allocation of Attention to Stimulus Features in Categorization

Blair, Mark R.
Watson, Marcus R.
Walshe, Calen R.
Maj, Fillip

¹Cognitive Science Program and Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
²Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University

Marcus R. Watson is now at the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

This work was supported by funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund to Mark R. Blair. Portions of the present article were presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in November 2007.

We acknowledge the Cognitive Science Lab team, specifically Jordan Barnes, Bill Chen, Christine Gerson, Luvdeep Malhi, Gordon Pang, Jordan Shimell, Steve Smith, Mike Wood, and especially Kim Meier for aid in data collection and data analysis and for reviewing the relevant literature and making many helpful suggestions about (numerous) earlier versions of the article. We also thank Michael Proulx, Michael Roberts, and Richard Wright for their insightful comments on an early draft. Finally, we are grateful for the comments of Stephan Lewandowsky.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mark R. Blair, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada V5A 1S6. E-mail: [email protected]

Received June 12, 2008

Revision received March 8, 2009

Accepted March 23, 2009

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 35(5):p 1196-1206, September 2009. | DOI: 10.1037/a0016272

Humans have an extremely flexible ability to categorize regularities in their environment, in part because of attentional systems that allow them to focus on important perceptual information. In formal theories of categorization, attention is typically modeled with weights that selectively bias the processing of stimulus features. These theories make differing predictions about the degree of flexibility with which attention can be deployed in response to stimulus properties. Results from 2 eye-tracking studies show that humans can rapidly learn to differently allocate attention to members of different categories. These results provide the first unequivocal demonstration of stimulus-responsive attention in a categorization task. Furthermore, the authors found clear temporal patterns in the shifting of attention within trials that follow from the informativeness of particular stimulus features. These data provide new insights into the attention processes involved in categorization.