ArticleCognitive psychology2022
The quest for simplicity in human learning: Identifying the constraints on attention.
Article in Cognitive psychology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Working memory, exploration, and cognitive development.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Article
- The Development of Selective Attention in Children's Emotion Reasoning.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Article
- Algorithmic personalization of information can cause inaccurate generalization and overconfidence.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- A little imprecision goes a long way in launching memory development.Child development perspectives · 2025Article
- People display consistent recency and primacy effects in behavior and neural activity across perceptual and value-based judgments.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Examining the Relationship Between Early Experience, Selective Attention, and the Formation of Learning Traps.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Dissociable Roles of the Dorsolateral and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Human Categorization.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- "The eyes are the window to the representation": Linking gaze to memory precision and decision weights in object discrimination tasks.Psychological review · 2024Article
- Cognitive Inertia: Cyclical Interactions Between Attention and Memory Shape Learning.Current directions in psychological science · 2024Article
- The Role of Attention in Category Representation.Cognitive science · 2024Article
- Cognition: The power of simple associative learning.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- As within, so without, as above, so below: Common mechanisms can support between- and within-trial category learning dynamics.Psychological review · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
For better or worse, humans live a resource-constrained existence; only a fraction of physical sensations ever reach conscious awareness, and we store a shockingly small subset of these experiences in memory for later use. Here, we examined the effects of attention constraints on learning. Among models that frame selective attention as an optimization problem, attention orients toward information that will reduce errors. Using this framing as a basis, we developed a suite of models with a range of constraints on the attention available during each learning event. We fit these models to both choice and eye-fixation data from four benchmark category-learning data sets, and choice data from another dynamic categorization data set. We found consistent evidence for computations we refer to as "simplicity", where attention is deployed to as few dimensions of information as possible during learning, and "competition", where dimensions compete for selective attention via lateral inhibition.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.