Attention and Associative Learning
From Brain to Behaviour

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.

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.

1. An introduction to attention and learning
2. Two theories of attention: A review and a possible integration
3. Attentional learning
4. Selective attention to conditioned stimuli in human discrimination learning: Untangling the effects of outcome prediction, valence, arousal and uncertainty
5. Latent inhibition
6. Attention and perceptual learning
7. Acquired distinctiveness and equivalence: A synthesis
8. Attention and human associative learning
9. On the use of the term 'attention'
10. Attention and memory in human learning
11. Backward blocking of relevance-indicating cues:Evidence for locally eayesian learning
12. Brain systems of attention in associative learning
13. Neural correlates of attentional set
14. Clinical studies of attention and learning