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Updated: Jul 8, 2026

A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets
Published on: December 5, 2014
An attention-based associative account of adjacent and nonadjacent dependency learning
Sébastien Pacton1, Pierre Perruchet
1Institut de Psychologie, Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurosciences Cognitives, Universite Paris Descartes, Paris, France. sebastien.pacton@univ-paris5.fr
Abstract:
In 5 experiments, results showed that when participants are faced with materials embedding relations between both adjacent and nonadjacent elements, they learn exclusively the type of relations they had to actively process in order to meet the task demands, irrespective of the spatial contiguity of the paired elements. These results are consonant with current theories positing that attention is a necessary condition for learning. More important, the results provide support for a more radical conception, in which the joint attentional processing of 2 events is also a sufficient condition for learning the relation between them. The well-documented effect of contiguity could be a by-product of the fact that attention generally focuses on contiguous events. This reappraisal considerably extends the scope of approaches based on associative or statistical processes.
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