ABSTRACT
Discrimination learning is seen as a two-stage process whereby the organism first attends to one or more dimensions and then chooses a stimulus value on an attended dimension. This chapter shows that general attention theory, whatever its successes, has nevertheless neglected a very important dimension in discrimination learning. Quantitative tests of the capacity of attention theory to accommodate the data from subproblem analyses of extradimensional shift learning have been made by D. L. Medin. The chapter discusses the general factors of subject population, dimension quality, and setting control as if they were readily separable factors in operation. It considers a formulation that does accommodate the subproblem data, a formulation that derives ultimately from the work of the Gibsons. Similar setting or “subproblem” analyses have been made of extra-dimensional shift learning of children of different ages. The chapter explores the implications of these ideas for analysis of traditional discrimination and concept learning paradigms.
