A Theory of Attention: Variations in the Associability of Stimuli with Reinforcement

According to theories of selective attention, learning about a stimulus depends on attending to that stimulus; this is represented in two-stage models by saying that subjects switch in analyzers as well as learning stimulusresponse associations. This assumption, however, is equally well represented in a formal model by the incorporation of a stimulus-specific learning-rate parameter, a, into the equations describing changes in the associative strength of stimuli. Theories of selective attention have also assumed (a) that subjects learn to attend to and ignore relevant and irrelevant stimuli (i.e., that a may increase or decrease depending on the correlation of a stimulus with reinforcement) and (b) that there is an inverse relationship between the probabilities of attending to different stimuli (i.e., that an increase in a to one stimulus is accompanied by a decrease in a to others). The first assumption is used to explain the phenomena of acquired distinctiveness and dimensional transfer, the second those of overshadowing and blocking. Although the first assumption is justified by the data, the second is not: Overshadowing and blocking are better explained by the choice of an appropriate rule for changing a, such that a decreases to stimuli that signal no change from the probability of reinforcement predicted by other stimuli.