Contextual control of attentional allocation in human discrimination learning.

Uengoer, Metin; Lachnit, Harald; Lotz, Anja; Koenig, Stephan; Pearce, John M.

doi:10.1037/a0030599

Cited by 8 publications

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“…Uengoer, Lachnit, Lotz, Koenig, and Pearce (2013) and George and Kruschke (2012) demonstrated that changes in associability can come under the control of contextual stimuli.…”

Section: Context Modulation Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One aim was to assess the validity of the conclusion in terms of context-specific attention drawn from the studies by Uengoer et al (2013) and George and Kruschke (2012). In these two previous studies, contextual control of attention during initial training was inferred from subsequent differences in learning rates.…”

Section: Context Modulation Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, when looking for a friend in a crowd of people, it may be advantageous to attend to clothing color, while, when searching for a book in a crowded library, clothing color provides no useful information. In view of this, the ability of contextspecific attention (George & Kruschke, 2012;Uengoer et al, 2013) appears to be an obvious way in which organisms may deal with the ever-changing demands in their environments.However, many theories of learning and attention neglected the context as a modulator for stimulus processing (e.g., Kruschke, 1992;Le Pelley, 2004;Mackintosh, 1975;Pearce, George, & Redhead, 1998;Pearce & Mackintosh, 2010). Thus, these models are unable to capture the possibility that a stimulus receives considerable attention in one context, while being ignored in a different context.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…If this inference is valid, then it should be possible to arrive at the same conclusion using other indicators of attention. Therefore, Experiment 1 was based on the procedures used by Uengoer et al (2013) and George and Kruschke (2012), but in addition, included measures of eye-gaze as a marker of attention. By means of this measure, we investigated whether training a stimulus as relevant in one context, but as irrelevant in another context, results in corresponding changes in overt attention, and we explored whether changes in overt attention are transferred to novel stimuli in a context-specific manner.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The second aim of the present study was to investigate whether such explicit training in which the significance of a cue changes according to context is necessary for the formation of contextual control of associability. This question was addressed by Experiments 2 and 3.Both experiments used a procedure adopted by Uengoer et al (2013). For each trial, participants were shown two cues from two dimensions (A, B; letter, shape), presented side by side, and the context was provided by a colored rectangular frame surrounding the cues.…”

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Context modulation of learned attention deployment

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In three experiments, we investigated contextual control of attention in human discrimination learning. In each experiment, participants initially received discrimination training in which cues from Dimension A were relevant in Context 1, but irrelevant in Context 2, while cues from Dimension B were irrelevant in Context 1, but relevant in Context 2. In Experiment 1, the same cues from each dimension were used in Contexts 1 and 2, while in Experiments 2 and 3, the cues from each dimension were changed across contexts. In each experiment, participants were subsequently shifted to a transfer discrimination involving novel cues from either dimension in order to assess contextual control of attention. In Experiment 1, measures of eye-gaze during the transfer discrimination revealed that Dimension A received more attention than Dimension B in Context 1, while the reverse occurred in Context 2. Corresponding results indicating contextual control of attention were found in Experiments 2 and 3, which used the speed of learning (associability) as an indirect marker of learned attentional changes. Implications of our results for current theories of learning and attention are discussed.Keywords: attention, context, discrimination learning, humans Context modulation of 3Prior experience changes the ease with which we learn about a stimulus. Such changes in associability are demonstrated, for instance, by the intra-dimensional/extra-dimensional shift (ID/ED shift) effect (for a survey, see Le Pelley, 2004;Le Pelley, Mitchell, Beesley, George, & Wills, 2016;Pearce & Mackintosh, 2010). In one demonstration of the effect, Uengoer and Lachnit (2012) trained human participants to categorize stimuli varying on two dimensions (e.g., color and shape). For the solution of the discrimination problem, two values from one dimension were relevant as they consistently signaled the category of the stimuli, while two values from another dimension were irrelevant by being unrelated to category membership (e.g., red squares and red circles belonged to one category, while blue squares and blue circles belonged to another category). Subsequently, participants received a second discrimination in which the stimuli were characterized by novel values from the previous dimensions (e.g., green, yellow; triangle, diamond). Uengoer and Lachnit observed that the second discrimination was acquired more rapidly when based on values from the dimension that had previously been trained as relevant for the first discrimination (ID shift; e.g., colors green and yellow signaled category membership) than when based on the previously irrelevant dimension (ED shift; e.g., shapes triangle and diamond signaled category membership). This effect suggests that training of the initial discrimination resulted in more attention being paid to stimulus features belonging to the relevant than the irrelevant dimension, and that these changes in attention were transferred to the stimuli of the second discrimination, which facilitated acquisition of the ID shift discrim...

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“…Uengoer, Lachnit, Lotz, Koenig, and Pearce (2013) and George and Kruschke (2012) demonstrated that changes in associability can come under the control of contextual stimuli.…”

Section: Context Modulation Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Context Modulation Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Emergence of complex dynamics of choice due to repeated exposures to extinction learning

et al. 2021

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Extinction learning, the process of ceasing an acquired behavior in response to altered reinforcement contingencies, is not only essential for survival in a changing environment, but also plays a fundamental role in the treatment of pathological behaviors. During therapy and other forms of training involving extinction, subjects are typically exposed to several sessions with a similar structure. The effects of this repeated exposure are not well understood. Here, we studied the behavior of pigeons across several sessions of a discrimination-learning task in context A, extinction in context B, and a return to context A to test the context-dependent return of the learned responses (ABA renewal). By focusing on individual learning curves across animals, we uncovered a session-dependent variability of behavior: (1) during extinction, pigeons preferred the unrewarded alternative choice in one-third of the sessions, predominantly during the first one. (2) In later sessions, abrupt transitions of behavior at the onset of context B emerged, and (3) the renewal effect decayed as sessions progressed. We show that the observed results can be parsimoniously accounted for by a computational model based only on associative learning between stimuli and actions. Our work thus demonstrates the critical importance of studying the trial-by-trial dynamics of learning in individual sessions, and the power of “simple” associative learning processes.

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Dissecting EXIT

Paskewitz

Jones

2020

Journal of Mathematical Psychology

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Contextual control of attentional allocation in human discrimination learning.

Cited by 8 publications

References 28 publications

Context modulation of learned attention deployment

Context modulation of learned attention deployment

Emergence of complex dynamics of choice due to repeated exposures to extinction learning

Dissecting EXIT

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