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Updated: Sep 3, 2025
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Published on: June 30, 2020
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The role of prediction in learned predictiveness
Carla J Eatherington1, Mark Haselgrove2
1Department of Human-Animal Interaction.
Summary
Learned attention to stimuli depends on their association with task responses, not just outcomes. This challenges existing theories by showing attentional bias develops when stimuli predict correct actions.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Learning and Memory
Background:
- Stimuli predicting important outcomes can capture attention, a phenomenon known as learned predictiveness.
- Current associative theories posit attention is driven by the strength of stimulus-outcome associations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether learned overt visual attention is solely a function of stimulus-outcome association strength.
- To propose an alternative framework for attentional modulation during learning.
Main Methods:
- Three experiments involving human participants exposed to stimulus triplets: a target, a perfectly correlated stimulus, and an uncorrelated stimulus.
- Eye-tracking technology was employed to measure overt visual attention.
- Participants' knowledge of stimulus-target associative relationships was assessed.
Main Results:
- Participants demonstrated good knowledge of stimulus-target associations regardless of correlation.
- Attentional bias toward the correlated stimulus emerged only when it and target-relevant responding preceded the target stimulus.
- This indicates that the association between stimuli and the task-relevant response, not just the outcome, modulates attention.
Conclusions:
- Learned overt visual attention is not solely determined by the relative strength of stimulus-outcome associations.
- Attentional changes during learning are modulated by the association between stimuli and task-relevant responses.
- A revised framework is proposed where response-stimulus associations play a critical role in attentional capture.
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