The role of irrelevant stimuli in human discrimination learning.

Abstract

The experiment was designed to determine whether human subjects learn not to attend to irrelevant stimuli during discrimination training. Each subject was presented successively with 2 discrimination problems. Stimuli that were irrelevant in the 1st problem were used in the 2d problem as irrelevant stimuli for some subjects and as relevant stimuli for others. It was expected that if the subject had learned, in the 1st problem, not to attend to the irrelevant stimuli, his performance on the 2d problem would be affected. The results revealed no such effects. There was no evidence that responses of any sort were acquired to the irrelevant stimuli during discrimination training.