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Confirmation Biases

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Updated: Sep 4, 2025

A Two-interval Forced-choice Task for Multisensory Comparisons

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Published on: November 9, 2018

Macaques preferentially attend to intermediately surprising information.

Shengyi Wu¹, Tommy Blanchard², Emily Meschke³

¹Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, 2121 Berkeley Way West, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

Biology Letters

|July 20, 2022

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Rhesus monkeys spontaneously attend to moderately surprising events, similar to humans. This U-shaped attention preference suggests an evolutionarily preserved strategy for maximizing learning from informative sources.

Keywords:

attention eye tracking rhesus macaque statistical learning

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Comparative Psychology
Neuroscience

Background:

Normative learning theories propose preferential attention to informative sources, constrained by cognitive processing capacity.
Human infants and adults exhibit strategic attention deployment aligned with these theories.
Previous research has not extensively explored attentional preferences in non-human primates regarding surprisingness.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether rhesus monkeys display a similar U-shaped attentional preference for events of moderate surprisingness.
To determine if this attentional pattern is spontaneous and not driven by specific goals or rewards.
To explore the evolutionary basis of attentional strategies for optimal learning.

Main Methods:

Observational study design involving rhesus monkeys.
Presentation of events with varying degrees of surprisingness.
Measurement of attentional responses (e.g., looking time) to different stimuli.
Control for specific goals and contingent rewards.

Main Results:

Rhesus monkeys demonstrated a significant preference for attending to events of moderate surprisingness.
This preference was observed over events that were either less or more surprising.
The attentional pattern occurred spontaneously, without explicit task instructions or reward contingencies.

Conclusions:

The findings suggest that rhesus monkeys, like humans, exhibit a U-shaped attentional preference for moderately surprising stimuli.
This behavior indicates an evolutionarily conserved mechanism for optimizing learning.
This spontaneous strategy guides attention toward maximally informative, yet processable, environmental information.