Attentional changes in blocking are not a consequence of lateral inhibition |
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| Authors: | Oren Griffiths and M E Le Pelley |
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| Institution: | (1) Department of Psychology, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, USA; |
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| Abstract: | In three human causal learning experiments, we examined attentional modulation in the blocking task, in which participants
typically learn little about a novel cue B when it is paired with a previously trained, predictive cue A. Evidence indicates
that this blocking training led to a decrement in attention to the blocked cue B. The present experiments addressed whether
this decrease in attention to the blocked cue could be better explained as being due to lateral inhibition from the pretrained
cue A to the blocked cue B, or as a cue-specific property that is not conditional on the presence or absence of other stimuli.
Strong effects of learned predictiveness were observed on participants’ causal judgments (Experiment 1) and choice behavior
(Experiments 2 and 3). However, no evidence for lateral inhibitory processes emerged in any of the experiments, despite explicit
attempts to maximize experimental sensitivity to this effect. The results are discussed in the context of formal models of
the operation of attentional processes in human and animal learning. |
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