Visual attention to features by associative learning

• Published in: Cognition 2014-11, Vol.133 (2), p.488-501
• Main Authors: Gozli, Davood G., Moskowitz, Joshua B., Pratt, Jay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Activity levels. Psychomotricity; Association Learning - physiology; Associative learning; Attention - physiology; Bias; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition; Color Perception - physiology; Colour; Episodic memory; Feature-based attention; Female; Form Perception - physiology; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Learning; Learning. Memory; Male; Memory; Memory, Episodic; Perception; Photic Stimulation; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Stimuli; Vigilance. Attention. Sleep; Vision; Visual attention; Visual communication; Visual Perception - physiology; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.07.014

•Observers learned arbitrary associations between shapes and colors.•After learning the association, bias for a shape target caused a bias for the associated color.•The modulated bias for colors seemed to rely on encountering shapes and colors in spatiotemporal conjunction and not merely in a sequence. Expecting a particular stimulus can facilitate processing of that stimulus over others, but what is the fate of other stimuli that are known to co-occur with the expected stimulus? This study examined the impact of learned association on feature-based attention. The findings show that the effectiveness of an uninformative color transient in orienting attention can change by learned associations between colors and the expected target shape. In an initial acquisition phase, participants learned two distinct sequences of stimulus–response–outcome, where stimuli were defined by shape (‘S’ vs. ‘H’), responses were localized key-presses (left vs. right), and outcomes were colors (red vs. green). Next, in a test phase, while expecting a target shape (80% probable), participants showed reliable attentional orienting to the color transient associated with the target shape, and showed no attentional orienting with the color associated with the alternative target shape. This bias seemed to be driven by learned association between shapes and colors, and not modulated by the response. In addition, the bias seemed to depend on observing target–color conjunctions, since encountering the two features disjunctively (without spatiotemporal overlap) did not replicate the findings. We conclude that associative learning – likely mediated by mechanisms underlying visual object representation – can extend the impact of goal-driven attention to features associated with a target stimulus.