Dr Tom Beesley

Attentional processing is at the heart of human learning, since there exists a very clear reciprocal relationship: as we start to learn about the world, our attention is biased in interesting ways, and these attentional biases affect how we learn in the future. I will discuss the successes of formal attentional models of learning, first derived as explanations of animal cognition, but successfully applied in many instances to data from human learning. I will then turn to the domain of implicit learning, specifically recent work on the contextual cuing of visual search. To what extent is this type of learning governed by similar associative mechanisms?

Host: Professor Derrick Watson