International Graduate School of Neuroscience

Ambiguity, Attention, and Context

Thursday, August 13, 2015, 11 a.m., Seminar Room FNO - 01 / 117

• Juan M. Rosas
• Department of Psychology, University of Jaen, Spain

Attentional Theory of Context Processing suggests that ambiguity in the meaning of the stimuli leads subjects to pay attention to the context so that retrieval of all the information becomes context-specific. Ambiguity of the situation seems to be the main factor that leads to a raise on the attention to the context.I will present results from our laboratory confirming this idea when attention to the contexts in human predictive learning is evaluated through the recording of participants’ eye-fixations.Additionally, I will be presenting recent results from our laboratory in classical conditioning and spatial learning with rats, and in human predictive learning, suggesting that ambiguity leads to a general increase in attention that facilitates subsequent acquisition of new information, regardless of whether this information involves contexts or not.I will discuss the implications of these findings for the understanding of how contexts control behavior.

Host

• Onur Güntürkün
  Department of Biopsychology, Faculty of Psychology, Research group FOR 1581 "Extinction Learning", Ruhr-University Bochum