What is learned during automatization? The role of attention in constructing an instance.

Abstract

Seven experiments were conducted to examine the role of attention in automatization.Ss searched 2-word displays for members of a target category in divided-attention, focused-attention, and dual-task conditions.The main issue was whether attention conditions would affect what Ss learned about co-occurrences of the words in the displays.The attention hypothesis, derived from the instance theory of automaticity, predicts learning of co-occurrences in divided-attention and dual-task conditions in which Ss attend to both words but not in focused-attention conditions in which Ss only attend to 1 word.The data supported the attention hypothesis and therefore the instance theory.This article concerns what is learned during automatization.This is an important question in the automaticity literature, especially from the perspective of memory-based theories, such as the instance theory of automaticity (Logan, 1988(Logan, ,1990(Logan, , 1992)).Memory-based theories assume that automatic performance is based on retrieval of representations of past solutions from memory.What "gets into" those representations during learning and what is "taken out" of them during automatic performance are central questions in memory-based theories.The purpose of this article is to evaluate the answers offered by the instance theory of automaticity.The answers are important because they are derived from two of the three main assumptions of the theory: obligatory encoding and instance representation.The obligatory encoding assumption says that attention determines what gets into the representation.The instance representation assumption says that the representations in memory are instances-separate representations of cooccurrences.Attention determines what is in an instance; attention determines which co-occurrences are remembered.The experiments tested this hypothesis.What Is an Instance?The instance representation assumption consists of two related assumptions.The first is that each event is represented