Contextual control over selective attention: evidence from a two-target method

MacLellan, Ellen; Shore, David I.; Milliken, Bruce

doi:10.1007/s00426-014-0593-1

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Finally, our study capitalized on yet another criterion of automaticity, which is speed. By introducing a response deadline of 1,000 ms, we exerted time pressure on participants during the task, which limits controlled processes during the task to a minimum, and has been shown to foster habitual responding (Hardwick et al, 2018;Luque et al, 2019). In sum, we thus feel justified in claiming that the CL effects that were obtained in our study reflect the operation of automatic processes, and thus can be characterized as being implicit.…”

Section: The Question Of Automaticitymentioning

confidence: 87%

“…In our task, participants classify the color of printed words (neutral adjectives) on each trial. However, each word is presented most often in two of four colors (high 2 A similar rationale is used in studies investigating the competing influence of local and global contexts on thought and action (e.g., Meier and Kane, 2013;MacLellan et al, 2015;Fröber et al, 2018). contingency combinations) and less often in the remaining two colors (low contingency combinations, see Table 1).…”

Section: An Episodic Account Of Habit Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Law of Recency: An Episodic Stimulus-Response Retrieval Account of Habit Acquisition

2020

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A habit is a regularity in automatic responding to a specific situation. Classical learning psychology explains the emergence of habits by an extended learning history during which the response becomes associated to the situation (learning of stimulus-response associations) as a function of practice ("law of exercise") and/or reinforcement ("law of effect"). In this paper, we propose the "law of recency" as another route to habit acquisition that draws on episodic memory models of automatic response regulation. According to this account, habitual responding results from (a) storing stimulusresponse episodes in memory, and (b) retrieving these episodes when encountering the stimulus again. This leads to a reactivation of the response that was bound to the stimulus (c) even in the absence of extended practice and reinforcement. As a measure of habit formation, we used a modified color-word contingency learning (CL) paradigm, in which irrelevant stimulus features (i.e., word meaning) were predictive of the to-be-executed color categorization response. The paradigm we developed allowed us to assess effects of global CL and of an instance-based episodic response retrieval simultaneously within the same experiment. Two experiments revealed robust CL as well as episodic response retrieval effects. Importantly, these effects were not independent: Controlling for response retrieval effects eliminated effects of CL, which supports the claim that habit formation can be mediated by episodic retrieval processes, and that short-term binding effects are not fundamentally separate from long-term learning processes. Our findings have theoretical and practical implications regarding (a) models of long-term learning, and (b) the emergence and change of habitual responding.

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Section: The Question Of Automaticitymentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: An Episodic Account Of Habit Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Law of Recency: An Episodic Stimulus-Response Retrieval Account of Habit Acquisition

2020

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Perceptual similarity induces overinvestment in an attentional blink task

MacLellan

Shore

Milliken

2017

Psychological Research

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The overinvestment account of the attentional blink (AB) posits that the AB results from the allocation of more resources than necessary to encode a first target (T1), which in turn lowers the resources available to encode a second target (T2) shortly thereafter. Across two experiments, we examined whether resource allocation to T1, and thus overinvestment that results in an AB effect, might be limited by perceptual mechanisms that evaluate the need for encoding resources. The key result observed in both experiments was that a relatively easy to encode T1 can nonetheless result in an AB when it is perceptually similar to a more difficult to encode T1. The importance of experimental context as an influence on the allocation, or overinvestment, of attentional resources to T1 is highlighted by these findings.

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