Special Coverage
Cognitive Inertia: When Learning Distorts Reality (9)
Brandon Turner, Nathaniel Blanco, and Layla Unger (The Ohio State University), Eter Kvam (University of Florida), Robert Ralston and Vladimir Sloutsky (The Ohio State University)
Summary by Jonathan Caballero, Digital Content Associate Editor
This recap is part of a special series of session summaries from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.
Shifting Attention Based On Reprioritizations
Brandon Turner and his team explored the interrelations of attention, learning, and mental representations to guide-decision making. We can’t pay attention to every piece of information all the time, so we need to learn what to pay attention to. Focusing our attention on the most relevant information speeds up decision-making. But whenever we prioritize something, we deprioritize something else, don’t we? When the relevance of information changes over time, learned attentional patterns could lead us to fall into information traps. These traps occur when we fail to adapt our decision-making because we fail to attend to suddenly relevant information. Turner and his colleagues used a task where cartoons (see image below) are categorized based on various dimensions, and some more relevant than others (Phase 1). Afterward, previously relevant information became irrelevant (Phase 2), and participants had to re-learn how to classify them. 
They built models ofmental representations to capture each dimension’s relevance and used eye-tracking to test whether gazing patterns reflect this relevance. Spoiler: they do! As shown in the figure below, when participants have no expectations of relevance (Phase 1), learning occurs rapidly. But when relevance changes (Phase 2), re-learning is much slower. Participants fall into an information trap! 
Turner and team tested hypothetical attentional-control policies that allowed for avoiding information traps, including:
What to attend in this summary? Paying attention to important information is useful. But always keep an eye open! This advice could save you from falling to see other important information hidden in plain sight!
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