Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Learning Requires Attention For Binding Affective Reinforcement To Information Content, Chia Mun Foo

Scripps Senior Theses

Humans are limited in their capacity to process information about the environment; to choose the most salient details to process, we have to make rapid value appraisals and prioritize our attentional resources. In this proposed study, it is expected that attention is required to learn from affective information. Learning is measured by the difference between update (the difference between the first and second estimation) and the estimation error (the difference between the average likelihood and the first estimation). Using a belief-updating paradigm, participants will be asked to estimate their likelihood of encountering a negative event, once before and once after …