title: Ambiguity produces attention shifts in category learning.
abstract: It has been suggested that people and nonhuman animals protect their knowledge from interference by shifting attention toward the context when presented with information that contradicts their previous beliefs. Despite that suggestion, no studies have directly measured changes in attention while participants are exposed to an interference treatment. In the present experiments, we adapted a dot-probe task to track participants' attention to cues and contexts while they were completing a simple category learning task. The results support the hypothesis that interference produces a change in the allocation of attention to cues and contexts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Primary Care and Public Health Sciences, King's College London SE1 1UL, United Kingdom Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London WC1H 0AH, United Kingdom miguel.vadillo@kcl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Vadillo
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicología Básica, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid 28040, Spain.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Orgaz
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia Departamento de Psicología Básica, Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Málaga (IBIMA), Universidad de Málaga, Málaga 29071, Spain.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Luque
authors.affiliation: Facultad de Psicología, Universidad del País Vasco, San Sebastián 20018, Spain.
authors.forename: James Byron
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Nelson
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D035501:Uncertainty