Category structure and region-specific selective attention

A fundamental component of human categorization involves learning to attend selectively to relevant dimensions and ignore irrelevant ones. Past research has shown that humans can learn flexible strategies in which the attended dimensions vary depending on the region of feature space in which classification takes place. However, region-specific selective attention (RSA) is often challenging to learn. Here, we test the hypothesis that RSA is facilitated when individual categories are embedded within single regions of stimulus space rather than dispersed across multiple regions. We conduct an experiment that varies across conditions whether categories are embedded within regions, but in which the same RSA strategy would benefit performance across the conditions. To evaluate the hypothesis, we use measures of overall performance accuracy as well as comparisons among formal computational models that do and do not make allowance for RSA. We find strong support for the hypothesis among the upper-median-performing participants in the tested groups. However, even in the condition that promotes the learning of RSA, performance is considerably worse than in comparison conditions in which a single set of dimensions can be attended throughout the entire stimulus space.