The role of selection history in the learned predictiveness effect.

Previous research has shown that cues that are good predictors of relevant outcomes receive more attention than nonpredictive cues.This attentional bias is thought to stem from the different predictive value of cues.However, because successful performance requires more attention to predictive cues, the bias may be a lingering effect of previous attention to cues (i.e., a selection history effect) instead.Two experiments assessed the contribution of predictive value and selection history to the bias produced by learned predictiveness.In a first task, participants responded to pairs of cues, only one of which predicted the correct response.A second task was superficially very similar, but the correct response was determined randomly on each trial and participants responded based on some physical characteristic of a target stimulus in each compound.Hence, in this latter task, participants had to pay more attention to the target stimuli, but these stimuli were not consistently associated with a specific response.Results revealed no differences in the attentional bias towards the relevant stimuli in the two tasks, suggesting that the bias induced by learned predictiveness is a consequence of deploying more attention to predictive stimuli during training.Thus, predictiveness may not bias attention by itself, adding nothing over and above the effect expected by selection history. Public significance statementPrevious research has shown that we pay more attention to stimuli that are reliably associated with subsequent important events, commonly known as predictive cues.However, this effect is often studied in experimental tasks that force participants to pay attention to these stimuli to achieve successful performance, which introduces a potential confounding variable.Indeed, in the present study, we show that the attentional bias towards stimuli that are consistently associated with a subsequent event is probably not driven by their predictive value.Instead, it appears that once participants begin to focus on certain stimuli, they have a lingering tendency to continue paying attention to them, even when they are SELECTION HISTORY AND PREDICTIVENESS 3 no longer relevant.These findings are important as they challenge the current interpretation of attentional biases towards predictive cues.