Substantial research has focused on the allocation of spatial attention based on goals or perceptual salience. In everyday life, however, people also direct attention using their previous experience. Here we investigate the pace at which people incidentally learn to prioritize specific locations. Participants searched for a T among Ls in a visual…

Children of ages 5 and 8 years were given one of three learning tasks: (a) a component selection problem, in which two stimulus components were redundant and (b) two incidental learning tasks, in which one component of the stimuli was task-relevant and the other was incidental. A posttest, measuring the children's recall for information about each…

Research supported in part by a Public Health Service Fellowship (MH-6668) and by Grant M-3519 from the National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Public Health Service.

Study is an investigation of the effects of an attention-focusing variable--spatial separation of central and incidental cues--and a cognitive strategy factor--verbal labeling of central cues--and their interaction on the incidental learning of Ss younger than those previously tested with these manipulations. (Authors)

This study investigated developmental changes in memory performance for two contrasting populations in Urban and Rural Yucatan, Mexico. Subjects were divided into five groups defined by age, including children and adults. All urban S's were in school, while only the two younger rural groups were in school, and older rural S's had little or no…

Incidental learning in 8- and 12-year-old children was assessed with a variety of stimulus materials. Experiment 1 compared two types of material; (a) geometric figures, whose central and incidental components were shape and color, respectively and (b) stimuli whose components were separate pictures, as in the typical developmental study of this…

To study the development of selective attention in children a paradigm was developed in which certain features of the stimulus were designated as relevant for task performance while others were defined as incidental. Performance on the central task was assessed as well as later recall of information about the incidental stimuli, and these two…

The relationship between placement of adjunct questions in instructional material and incidental and intentional learning was investigated. A total of 150 undergraduate students assigned to five experimental groups studied ten paragraphs with questions interspersed at different locations in the text. Performance on incidental items was…