Attention in Learning

Learners exhibit many apparently irrational behaviors in their use of cues, sometimes learning to ignore relevant cues or to attend to irrelevant ones. A learning phenomenon called highlighting seems especially to demand explanation in terms of learned attention. Highlighting complements the classic phenomenon of conditioned blocking, which has been shown to involve learned inattention. Highlighting and blocking, along with a wide spectrum of other perplexing learning phenomena, can be accounted for by recent connectionist models in which both attentional shifting and associative learning are driven by the rational goal of rapid error reduction.