Extremely Selective Attention: Eye-Tracking Studies of the Dynamic Allocation of Attention to Stimulus Features in Categorization

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2009-09, Vol.35 (5), p.1196-1206
• Main Authors: Blair, Mark R, Watson, Marcus R, Walshe, R. Calen, Maj, Fillip
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Activity levels. Psychomotricity; Analysis of Variance; Attention; Attention - physiology; Biological and medical sciences; Canada; Classification; Classification (Cognitive Process); Cognitive Measurement; College Students; Concept Formation - physiology; Decision Making - physiology; Discrimination Learning - physiology; Experimental psychology; Experiments; Eye Movements; Eye Movements - physiology; Female; Fixation, Ocular - physiology; Foreign Countries; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Learning Processes; Male; Models, Psychological; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Perception; Photic Stimulation - methods; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time - physiology; Selective Attention; Studies; Tracking; Vigilance. Attention. Sleep; Vision; Visual Learning; Visual Perception; Visual Stimuli
• ISSN: 0278-7393; 1939-1285
• DOI: 10.1037/a0016272

Humans have an extremely flexible ability to categorize regularities in their environment, in part because of attentional systems that allow them to focus on important perceptual information. In formal theories of categorization, attention is typically modeled with weights that selectively bias the processing of stimulus features. These theories make differing predictions about the degree of flexibility with which attention can be deployed in response to stimulus properties. Results from 2 eye-tracking studies show that humans can rapidly learn to differently allocate attention to members of different categories. These results provide the first unequivocal demonstration of stimulus-responsive attention in a categorization task. Furthermore, the authors found clear temporal patterns in the shifting of attention within trials that follow from the informativeness of particular stimulus features. These data provide new insights into the attention processes involved in categorization.