Eyetracking and selective attention in category learning

An eyetracking version of the classic Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961) experiment was conducted. Forty years of research has assumed that category learning often involves learning to selectively attend to only those stimulus dimensions useful for classification. We confirmed that participants learned to allocate their attention optimally. We also found that learners tend to fixate all stimulus dimensions early in learning. This result obtained despite evidence that participants were also testing one-dimensional rules during this period. Finally, the restriction of eye movements to only relevant dimensions tended to occur only after errors were largely (or completely) eliminated. We interpret these findings as consistent with multiple-systems theories of learning which maximize information input in order to maximize the number of learning modules involved, and which focus solely on relevant information only after one module has solved the learning problem. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.