Habit-like attention

Abstract

The control of selective attention is traditionally considered to be either goal-driven or stimulus-driven. Increasing research, however, has linked past experience to attentional selection. Effects of selection history may be transient, as in inter-trial priming, or durable. Here we review several examples of enduring changes of attention and relate them to properties of habits. Like motor habits, reading direction is reinforced over an extended period of time. Despite the brevity of training, probability learning, context learning, value-driven attention, and learned attentional set also exhibit habit-like properties, including automaticity, insensitivity to outcome devaluation, and inflexibility. A consideration of whether a selection history effect is habit-like may help taxonomize diverse forms of experience-driven attention.