Editing Animal cognition (section)

==== Selective Learning ====
Animals trained to discriminate between two stimuli, say black versus white, can be said to attend to the "brightness dimension", but this says little about whether this dimension is selected in preference to others. More enlightenment comes from experiments that allow the animal to choose from several alternatives.  For example, several studies have shown that performance is better on, for example, a color discrimination (e.g. blue vs green) after the animal has learned another color discrimination (e.g. red vs orange) than it is after training on a different dimension such as an X shape versus an O shape. The reverse effect happens after training on forms. Thus, the earlier learning appears to affect which dimension, color or form, the animal will attend to.<ref>{{cite book | vauthors = Mackintosh NJ | date = 1983 | title = Conditioning and Associative Learning | location = New York | publisher = Oxford University Press}}</ref>

Other experiments have shown that after animals have learned to respond to one aspect of the environment responsiveness to other aspects is suppressed.  In "blocking", for example, an animal is conditioned to respond to one stimulus ("A") by pairing that stimulus with reward or punishment.  After the animal responds consistently to A, a second stimulus ("B") accompanies A on additional training trials.  Later tests with the B stimulus alone elicit little response, suggesting that learning about B has been blocked by prior learning about A.<ref>{{cite book | vauthors = Kamin LJ | date = 1969 | chapter = Predictability, surprise, attention, and conditioning | veditors = Campbell BA, Church RM | title = Punishment and Aversive Behavior | location = New York | publisher = Appleton-Century-Crofts | pages = 279–296}}</ref>   This result supports the hypothesis that stimuli are neglected if they fail to provide new information.  Thus, in the experiment just cited,  the animal failed to attend to B because B added no information to that supplied by A.  If true, this interpretation is an important insight into attentional processing, but this conclusion remains uncertain because blocking and several related phenomena can be explained by models of conditioning that do not invoke attention.<ref>{{cite book | vauthors = Mackintosh NJ | date = 1994 | title = Animal Learning and Cognition | location = San Diego | publisher = Academic Press}}</ref>