Selective and divided attention in animals
Section snippets
Selective and divided attention in animals
The term attention can be used in a descriptive sense to identify procedures which show that certain aspects of a stimulus come to control responding while others do not. This form of attention has sometimes been called task-defined attention (Luck and Vecera, 2002). It can be shown, for example, that if one reinforces an animal's responses to one hue but not to another, independently of the shape on which the hue appears, hue, but not shape, will control the animal's responding (as measured by
Conclusions
The variety of attentional effects found with animals suggests that underlying processes not unlike those thought to occur in humans are also present in animals. Early experiments demonstrated that animals learn not merely about which stimuli to approach and which to avoid but they also learn to attend to the dimension along which the stimuli fall. The animals can then show evidence that they can benefit from this dimensional learning in their transfer of training to tasks in which attention to
Acknowledgement
Preparation of this article was facilitated by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH-63726.
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