Department of Industrial Psychology, Kwangwoon University, Wolgae-Dong, 447-1, Nowon-Gu, Seoul, South Korea.
Mem Cognit. 2011 May;39(4):649-65. doi: 10.3758/s13421-010-0050-3.
Research has shown that category learning is affected by (a) attention, which selects which aspects of stimuli are available for further processing, and (b) the existing semantic knowledge that learners bring to the task. However, little is known about how knowledge affects what is attended. Using eyetracking, we found that (a) knowledge indeed changes what features are attended, with knowledge-relevant features being fixated more often than irrelevant ones, (b) this effect was not due to an initial attentional bias toward relevant dimensions but rather emerged gradually as a result of observing category members, and (c) this effect grew even after a learning criterion was reached, that is, despite the absence of negative feedback. We argue that models of knowledge-based learning will remain incomplete until they specify mechanisms that dynamically select prior knowledge in response to observed category members and which then directs attention to knowledge-relevant dimensions and away from irrelevant ones.
研究表明，类别学习受到（a）注意力的影响，注意力选择刺激的哪些方面可供进一步处理，以及（b）学习者带到任务中的现有语义知识的影响。然而，对于知识如何影响注意力的对象，我们知之甚少。通过眼动追踪，我们发现（a）知识确实会改变被注意的特征，与知识相关的特征比不相关的特征更容易被注视，（b）这种效应不是由于对相关维度的初始注意力偏向，而是由于观察类别成员而逐渐出现的，（c）即使达到了学习标准，即尽管没有负面反馈，这种效应也会增强。我们认为，基于知识的学习模型在没有指定机制来动态选择观察到的类别成员响应的先前知识，并将注意力引导到与知识相关的维度而不是无关的维度之前，它们将仍然是不完整的。
