Elsevier

Behavioural Processes

Volume 69, Issue 1, 29 April 2005, Pages 1-15
Behavioural Processes

Selective and divided attention in animals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2005.01.004Get rights and content

Abstract

This article reviews some of the research on attentional processes in animals. In the traditional approach to selective attention, it is proposed that in addition to specific response attachments, animals also learn something about the dimension along which the stimuli fall (e.g., hue, brightness, or line orientation). More recently, there has been an attempt to find animal analogs to methodologies originally applied to research with humans. One line of research has been directed to the question of whether animals can locate a target among distracters faster if they are prepared for the presentation of the target (search image and priming). In the study of search image, the target is typically a food item and the cue consists of previous trials on which the same target is presented. In research on priming effects, the cue is typically different from the target but is a good predictor of its occurrence. The study of preattentive processes shows that perceptually, certain stimuli stand out from distracters better than others, depending not only on characteristics of the target relative to the distracters, but also on relations among the distracters. Research on divided attention is examined with the goal of determining whether an animal can process two elements of a compound sample with the same efficiency as one. Taken together, the reviewed research indicates that animals are capable of centrally (not just peripherally) attending to selective aspects of a stimulus display.

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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