The current study examined the effects of a brief mindfulness induction on overselectivity. Participants were randomly assigned to a mindfulness, unfocused attention (relaxation), or no-intervention group. Participants experienced their designated intervention for 10 min, and they underwent simultaneous discrimination training (AB+ CD-) followed…

Learning to categorize perceptually similar stimuli can result in people becoming more sensitive to differences along perceptual dimensions that are relevant to category membership and/or less sensitive to equivalent differences along irrelevant perceptual dimensions. These effects of acquired distinctiveness and acquired equivalence may be caused…

Two experiments assessed the effects of extinguishing a conditioned cue on subsequent context conditioning. Each experiment used a different video-game method where sensors predicted attacking spaceships and participants responded to the sensor in a way that prepared them for the upcoming attack. In Experiment 1 extinction of a cue which signaled…

Object-substitution masking (OSM) occurs when a mask, such as four dots that surround a brief target item, onsets simultaneously with the target and offsets a short time after the target, rather than simultaneously with it. OSM is a reduction in accuracy of reporting the target with the temporally trailing mask, compared with the simultaneously…

Behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuropsychological studies have revealed large developmental differences in various learning paradigms where learning from positive and negative feedback is essential. The differences are possibly due to the use of distinct strategies that may be related to spatial working memory and attentional control. In…

In both healthy participants and various patient populations, performance on attentional set-shifting tasks has been found to be affected by learned irrelevance and/or perseveration. The present study examined whether or not these processes also play a role during the initial discrimination learning phase of those tasks. To this end, participants…

To meet an increasing need to examine the neurophysiological underpinnings of behavior in rats, we developed a behavioral system for studying sensory processing, attention and discrimination learning in rats while recording firing patterns of neurons in one or more brain areas of interest. Because neuronal activity is sensitive to variations in…

We compared the ability of auditory, visual, and audiovisual (bimodal) exogenous cues to capture visuo-spatial attention under conditions of no load versus high perceptual load. Participants had to discriminate the elevation (up vs. down) of visual targets preceded by either unimodal or bimodal cues under conditions of high perceptual load (in…

Twenty-four younger (18-35 years) and 24 older adult participants (65 or older) were exposed to three experimental conditions involving the memorization words and their associated contextual features, with contextual feature complexity increasing from Conditions 1 to 3. In Condition 1, words presented varied only on one binary feature (color,…

Three experiments involving 20 severely and profoundly mentally retarded adults revealed that redundant color cues did not facilitate visual discrimination of lexigrams, while random assignment of color and distinctive-feature training did facilitate visual discrimination. (CL)

This study focused on the influence of gender schemas on children's abilities to focus their attention away from or toward stimuli containing the dimension of gender. Children identified as gender schematic and aschematic participated in a nonreversal discrimination learning paradigm in which one relevant dimension was gender-relevant and another…

The effect of stimulus novelty, an attentional variable, on learning set acquisition was investigated. Learning set (LS) acquisition refers to an improvement in performance across a series of problems which have a common basis of solution. The design of this study involved two groups, one in which the positive stimulus on Trial 2 involved the…

To test the theory that retardates are particularly slow in forming some visual habits, especially attention, a series of experiments were performed using a laboratory device which forced subjects to discriminate between color and form in exchange for an incentive reward. Stochastic models were applied to tests of lower level retardates which…

Four severely retarded and four nonretarded adolescents learned compound discriminations in the haptic (touch) modality using D. Ray's conflict-compound procedure. Subjects evinced selective attention effects in posttraining tests conducted in the haptic modality. Visual transfer tests revealed the effects of conflict-compound discrimination…

In three experiments, nine-month-old infants were trained to fixate on a particular feature in a pair of stimuli that varied along three dimensions. In a fourth experiment, infants were trained to fixate on a stimulus compound until reaching a learning criterion. Infants' discrimination learning under these conditions implied an ability to attend…