What is it about?
It has long been assumed that we pay more attention to things around us that help us predict important outcomes. However, in those demonstrations, people were told to focus on certain things before their attention was measured. We found that what really matters is not how useful those things are for predicting 'something', but the fact that people were already paying attention to them beforehand.
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Why is it important?
This paper challenges the common belief that we naturally focus on the most useful things for predicting outcomes. Instead, it suggests that our attention is strongly influenced by what we have focused on in the past. This insight has implications for understanding habits, biases, and how we process information in everyday life. It is particularly relevant for treating disorders involving attentional biases toward specific events (e.g., negative or threatening stimuli) and suggests that attentional training could help break those biases.
Perspectives
Tackling this work has been both complex and fascinating. It not only challenges a widely accepted attentional bias but also does so by offering a more parsimonious explanation of the effect. Despite the potential complexity of the article, the underlying idea is quite simple: if we have learned that paying attention to certain stimuli is useful, we will continue to do so.
Paula Balea
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The role of selection history in the learned predictiveness effect., Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance, August 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xhp0001240.
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