Reconciling the influence of predictiveness and uncertainty on stimulus salience: a model of attention in associative learning.

Reconciling the influence of predictiveness and uncertainty on stimulus salience: A model of attention in associative learning

Modeling attention in associative learning: two processes or one?

Certain studies of associative learning show that attention is more substantial to cues that have a history of being predictive of an outcome than to cues that are irrelevant. At the same time, other studies show that attention is more substantial to cues whose outcomes are uncertain than to cues whose outcomes are predictable. This has led to the suggestion of there being two kinds of attentio...

Attention and associative learning in humans: An integrative review.

This article presents a comprehensive survey of research concerning interactions between associative learning and attention in humans. Four main findings are described. First, attention is biased toward stimuli that predict their consequences reliably (learned predictiveness). This finding is consistent with the approach taken by Mackintosh (1975) in his attentional model of associative learnin...

Relative salience versus relative validity: cue salience influences blocking in human associative learning.

Two studies of human contingency learning investigated the influence of stimulus salience on the cue competition effect of blocking. These studies demonstrated that blocking (defined as a difference in responding to blocked and control cues) was greater for target cues that had high "semantic salience" than those of lower salience. Moreover participants showed weaker responding to high salience...

Latent inhibition and other salience modulation effects: same neural substrates?

The complexity of the environment is such that even a snapshot in time from a single modality can exceed the processing capacity of the human brain (Tsotsos, 1990). This means that selection of some incoming stimuli for more detailed analysis (while ignoring other stimuli) is essential for efficient cognitive processing. Without such filtering we would be inundated with competing sensory impres...