Interactions between learning and attention

Question 1

What is Dickinson (1980) say about changes in stimulus processing?

Answer 1

Functional perspective suggests that the importance of a CS and degree of processing it, should be related to its power as a predictor of the US

Question 2

What is latent inhibition?

Answer 2

Learning proceeds more slowly to a stimulus that has been pre-exposed compared to a novel stimulus.

This is not predicted by the Rescorla-Wagner model at all

Question 3

What did Lubow and Moore (1905) say about incompletion?

Answer 3

• tested sheep and goats, measuring the conditioned response of raising their leg
• light and fan given on separate trials followed by a shock - one was pre-exposed in absence of US
• how many trials it takes for the sheep to learn a particular learning criteria, was longer to the pre-exposed stimulus than the novel one, learning was slower for this

Question 4

What is Mackintosh’s attentional theory?

Answer 4

Blocking occurs because subjects learn to ignore the added element if it a redundant predictor of reinforcement

• If a cue is the best predictor of an outcome, then pay it more attention
• If a cue isn’t the best predictor of an outcome, then ignore it

Question 5

What is Dickinson (1980) view?

Answer 5

Consider the latent inhibition phenomenon

Maintains the processing of the CS depends upon its predictive power would argue that during the pre-exposure phase the animal learns thatthe CS predicts nothing of significance

Ability to command processing capacity in the learning mechanism is severely reduced, thus retarding any subsequent associative learning involving the CS

Question 6

What evidence in rats is there for changes in attention during blocking?

Answer 6

• No blocking if only one conditioned trial is given, need to learn that a cue is redundant so need multiple trials in stage 2
• Avolition of blocking occurs if there is one trial in stage 1 and multiple trials in stage 2
• The DV in this experiment is conditioned suppression
• With this DV smaller numbers = more conditioning

Question 7

What did Beesley and Pelley (2011) suggest about evidence from humans?

Answer 7

Stage 1 - shown A, C (specific allergic reactions) E and G (suffers a different allergic reaction), pretrained group looked at the cues for longer

Stage 2 - cues signal the same outcomes but now have added blocked cues, rapid loss of attention to those that were blocked

Control - never receive pre-training in stage 1, sit in the middle

Question 8

What did Baker and Mackintosh (1977) suggest about learned irrelavance?

Answer 8

Stage 1: Reduction in attention to the tone, tone/water established as redundant to each other

Stage 2 - found less contracts with the magazine in the tone/water group
But maybe the rats in the Tone/Water group just learned in Stage 1 that the tone predicted No Water
Wouldn’t need to appeal to changes in attention to explain the results

Tone/water group learnt slower than the control group
Learned Irrelevance training slows excitatory and inhibitory learning

Question 9

What is learned predictiveness in humans?

Answer 9

• presented with nonsense words, predict which of 2 sounds would appear in their headphones and press correlated keys
• stimulus A and D always outcome 1
• stimulus B and C always outcome 2
• V,W,X and Y are redundant and told them nothing about the outcome
• consistent with Mackintosh, attention is higher for the predictive condition

Question 10

What were the conditions in the learned predictiveness in humans?

Answer 10

Congruent = triangle appeared in the position recently occupied by the predictive cue (e.g. Risotto)

Incongruent = triangle appeared in the position just occupied by the irrelevant cue (e.g. Brownie)

Question 11

What did Haselgrove (2013) suggest about learned predictiveness in humans?

Answer 11

Stage 1: asked ppts to imagine themselves as doctors and see what their patients eat

• Either followed by itching or sweating
• Dot probe task - press key when see key stimulus
• Ppts bias to their attention on the screen prior to this target

Reaction times were slower when the targets were on the same time as the redundant word side (incongruent)

Question 12

How are regularities explored in the world?

Answer 12

• advantageous to pay attention to predictive cue
• attentional exploitation
• attention is shaped by differences in the extent to which the cues that presented on a given trial predict the outcome that occurs on that trial
• relative predictiveness of the presented cues
• what relevant stimulus in the environment tells us what we need to know