ABSTRACT
In Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology (Bartlett, 1932) Bartlett argued that perception and recognition are dynamically influenced by past experience, so that they are tuned to both the current contingencies and motivational states. Today, with the rapid development of new technologies in the neurosciences, there is an explosion of interest in the biological substrates of the processes that contribute to memory. For example, we are using increasingly selective interventions to produce dissociations in forgetting that tell us how memory is organised in terms of both cognitive processes and brain mechanisms, so as to develop neuropsychological theories. Attention is a much harder nettle to grasp because the term covers wide-ranging aspects of cognition: for example, general level of engagement with the environment or vigilance, span of apprehension or breadth of attention, attentional filtering or selection amongst the sensory impressions, aspects typically, but not necessarily, associated with “consciousness”. Behaviourally, attention has been operationalised through the measurement of orienting reactions to events of interest and by the use of selective learning tasks that manipulate the predictive validity of different signals. Here we will consider the “top-down” attentional processes through which past experience normally contributes to the selectivity seen in associative learning, shown as conditioned reactions to environmental stimuli and appropriate instrumental action.
