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Instinctive drift refers to the tendency of animals to revert to their innate behaviors despite repeated reinforcement. Breland and Breland demonstrated this concept in an experiment with a raccoon. The raccoon was trained to pick up two coins and place them in a container in exchange for food. Initially, the raccoon learned to associate the coins with food, making them a conditioned stimulus or a substitute for food. However, over time, the raccoon became less willing to put the coins into the...
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Humans are very diverse and although we share many similarities, we also have many differences. The social groups we belong to help form our identities (Tajfel, 1974). These differences may be difficult for some people to reconcile, which may lead to prejudice toward people who are different. Prejudice is a negative attitude and feeling toward an individual based solely on one’s membership in a particular social group (Allport, 1954; Brown, 2010). Prejudice is common against people who...
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In order to make good decisions, we use our knowledge and our reasoning. Often, this knowledge and reasoning is sound and solid. However, sometimes, we are swayed by biases or by others manipulating a situation. For example, let’s say you and three friends wanted to rent a house and had a combined target budget of $1,600. The realtor shows you only very run-down houses for $1,600 and then shows you a very nice house for $2,000. Might you ask each person to pay more in rent to get the...
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Related Experiment Video

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Irrelevant Stimuli and Action Control: Analyzing the Influence of Ignored Stimuli via the Distractor-Response Binding Paradigm
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Rejecting salient distractors: Generalization from experience.

Daniel B Vatterott1, Michael C Mozer2, Shaun P Vecera3

  • 1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, W311 Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA, 52242-1407, USA.

Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
|December 13, 2017
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Learning to ignore distractions improves task performance. Experience in varied environments enhances the ability to generalize learned distractor rejection to new stimuli, optimizing attentional control.

Keywords:
AttentionAttentional captureCognitive and attentional control

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

  • Distraction significantly impairs performance in daily tasks.
  • Attentional control, crucial for cognitive operations, involves selecting important information and limiting distractions.
  • Research differentiates between stimulus-driven and goal-driven selection, with experience shifting influence towards goal-driven factors.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if learned distractor rejection can be generalized to novel distractors.
  • To determine the impact of environmental variability on the generalizability of learned distractor rejection.
  • To explore the time course of developing generalized distractor rejection.

Main Methods:

  • Participants performed visual search tasks, ignoring salient color-singleton distractors.
  • Experiment 1 compared distractor rejection in variable versus homogeneous environments.
  • Experiments 2 and 3 tracked the development of distractor rejection over experimental blocks.

Main Results:

  • Learning distractor rejection in a variable environment led to more effective rejection of novel distractors.
  • Experience with multiple distractors across different blocks enabled effective rejection of subsequent novel distractors.
  • Variable stimulus environments promote generalizable learned distractor rejection.

Conclusions:

  • Generalizing learned distractor rejection is possible and influenced by environmental variability.
  • Attentional control optimization through experience is a form of learning.
  • Environmental context critically shapes the development and generalizability of attentional control strategies.