Selection history contributes to suboptimal attention strategies

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Decision Making

Background:

• Attentional control manages the trade-off between maximizing performance and minimizing effort.
• The brain often persists with previously successful attentional strategies to reduce cognitive load.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if past selection history can cause the persistence of counterproductive attentional strategies.
• To determine if this persistence competes with more optimal strategies.

Main Methods:

• Participants underwent training with a frequently encountered target color.
• A test phase followed where participants chose between two targets, with varying optimality based on stimulus color distribution.

Main Results:

• An attentional bias towards the previously frequent target color was observed during training.
• Participants' target choices in the test phase were generally optimal, reflecting performance maximization.
• Crucially, participants tended to report the previously frequent target color even when suboptimal.

Conclusions:

• Selection history plays a role in the perseveration of attentional strategies.
• This perseveration can lead to suboptimal performance, even when a more effective strategy is available.
• Understanding this bias is key to explaining why attentional control is sometimes inefficient.