Attention and salience in associative blocking

Abstract

The associative learning effect called blocking has previously been found in many cue-competition paradigms where all cues are of equal salience. Previous research by Hall, Mackintosh, Goodall, and dal Martello (1977) found that, in animals, salient cues were less likely to be blocked. Crucially, they also found that when the to-be-blocked cue was highly salient, the blocking cue would lose some control over responding. The present article extends these findings to humans and suggests that shifts in attention can explain the apparent loss of control by the previously learned cue. A connectionist model that implements attentional learning is shown to fit the main trends in the data. Model comparisons suggest that mere forgetting, implemented as weight decay, cannot explain the results. Copyright 2006 Psychonomic Society, Inc.