What is it about?
Attention is an important psychological process because it dictates what we perceive, learn, and remember. Since attention is a limited resource, it is beneficial to learn to attend to the most useful cues in our environment. There are two ways in which a cue can be useful: through its ability to consistently predict an outcome, or its relevance to choosing correct outcomes. Here, we show that either property is sufficient to attract attention and influence subsequent learning.
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Why is it important?
It is well-known that cues that are better predictors of outcomes attract our attention more than poor predictors. This paper tests a novel idea: that a cue can be a poor predictor yet still attract our attention through its relevance to making correct choices. These findings are important because they demonstrate that the ability of a cue to attract our attention is dynamic since it may be useful in one context but not another.
Perspectives
This paper is significant because it shows that attention to cues can be learned in different ways, and demonstrates how rigorous experimental designs can be used to disentangle different psychological processes.
Jessica Lee
University of Sydney
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: What makes a stimulus worthy of attention: Cue–outcome correlation and choice relevance in the learned predictiveness effect., Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition, June 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xlm0001365.
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