Attention and Associative Learning. from Brain to Behaviour

ABOUT THIS BOOK

• Brings together leading researchers in the fields of attention and learning to provide a lively debate on this timely topic
• Looks at the applied aspects of this knowledge for our understanding of clinical disorders, such as Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia
• Presents cutting edge research into the neural mechanisms of attention and learning

Attention and learning are two of the most important topics in contemporary cognitive psychology and behavioural neuroscience. Of even more interest is how the two interact. Meaningful stimuli and their meaningful effects are invariably embedded in a complex background of meaningless information. Yet, in order to learn about meaningful relationships between events, an organism needs to be able to extract the relevant from the irrelevant. The ability to direct attention selectively to some stimuli and away from others is one fundamental mechanism by which this filtering of information can occur. But what controls this selective attention? Why are certain stimuli selected and others rejected? What are the neural mechanisms underlying this ability? Are they the same in humans as in other animals? And what are the consequences of damage to this attentional system? These are the questions that this book aims to answer.

The idea of an interaction between attention and learning has experienced a huge surge of interest in recent years. Advances in behavioural neuroscience have made it possible to investigate the neural basis of attention mechanisms; advances in connectionist modelling techniques have allowed us to implement and test more complex computational models of the operation of these mechanisms; and recent studies have implicated impairments in the ability to deploy selective attention appropriately in disorders such as schizophrenia and Parkinson's Disease.

This book brings together leading international learning and attention researchers to provide both a comprehensive and wide-ranging overview of the current state of knowledge of this area as well as new perspectives and directions for the future. There are coherent themes that run throughout the book, but there are also, inevitably, fundamental disagreements between contributors on the role of attention in learning. Together, the views expressed in this book paint a picture of a vibrant and exciting area of psychological research, and will be essential reading for researchers of learning and attention.

Readership: Cognitive and comparative psychologists; neuroscientists

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1: Chris J. Mitchell and Mike E. Le Pelley: An introduction to attention and learning
2: John M Pearce and Nicholas J. Mackintosh: Two theories of attention: A review and a possible integration
3: Geoffrey Hall and Gabriel Rodriguez: Attentional learning
4: Lee Hogarth, Anthony Dickinson and Theodora Duka: Selective attention to conditioned stimuli in human discrimination learning: Untangling the effects of outcome prediction, valence, arousal and uncertainty
5: Nathan M. Holmes and Justin A. Harris: Latent inhibition
6: I.P.L. McLaren , A.J. Wills and S. Graham: Attention and perceptual learning
7: Robert C. Honey, James Close & E. Lin: Acquired distinctiveness and equivalence: A synthesis
8: M. E. Le Pelley: Attention and human associative learning
9: Philip Quinlan: On the use of the term 'attention'
10: Chris J. Mitchell: Attention and memory in human learning
11: JohnK.Kruschke and Stephen E. Denton: Backward blocking of relevance-indicating cues:Evidence for locally eayesian learning
12: Peter C. Holland and Jean-Marie Maddux: Brain systems of attention in associative learning
13: David N. George, Anais M. Duffaud & Simon Killcross: Neural correlates of attentional set
14: Adam Hampshire & Adrian M. Owen: Clinical studies of attention and learning

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Edited by Chris Mitchell, Associate Professor, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia, and Mike Le Pelley, Senior lecturer, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff UK