Sequential effects in response time reveal learning mechanisms and event representations.

Binary choice tasks, such as 2-alternative forced choice, show a complex yet consistent pattern of sequential effects, whereby responses and response times depend on the detailed pattern of prior stimuli going back at least 5 trials. We show this pattern is well explained by simultaneous incremental learning of 2 simple statistics of the trial sequence: the base rate and the repetition rate. Both statistics are learned by the same basic associative mechanism, but they contribute different patterns of sequential effects because they entail different representations of the trial sequence. Subtler aspects of the data that are not explained by these 2 learning processes alone are explained by their interaction, via learning from joint error correction. Specifically, the cue-competition mechanism that has explained classic findings in animal learning (e.g., blocking) appears to operate on learning of sequence statistics. We also find that learning of the base rate and repetition rate are dissociated into response and stimulus processing, respectively, as indicated by event-related potentials, manipulations of stimulus discriminability, and reanalysis of past experiments that eliminated stimuli or prior responses. Thus, sequential effects in these tasks appear to be driven by learning the response base rate and the stimulus repetition rate. Connections are discussed between these findings and previous research attempting to separate stimulus- and response-based sequential effects, and research using sequential effects to determine mental representations. We conclude that sequential effects offer a powerful means for uncovering representations and learning mechanisms.

The persistent impact of incidental experience.

As we perform daily activities--driving to work, unlocking the office door, or grabbing a coffee cup--our actions seem automatic and preprogrammed. Nonetheless, routine, well-practiced behavior is continually modulated by incidental experience: In repetitive experimental tasks, recent (~4) trials reliably influence performance and action choice. Psychological theories downplay the significance of sequential effects, explaining them as rapidly decaying perturbations of behavior, with no long-term consequences. We challenged this traditional perspective in two experiments designed to probe the impact of more distant experience, finding evidence for effects spanning up to a thousand intermediate trials. We present a normative theory in which these persistent effects reflect optimal adaptation to a dynamic environment exhibiting varying rates of change. The theory predicts a heavy-tailed decaying influence of past experience, consistent with our data, and suggests that individual incidental experiences are catalogued in a temporally extended memory utilized in order to optimize subsequent behavior.

Sequential dependencies in driving.

The effect of recent experience on current behavior has been studied extensively in simple laboratory tasks. We explore the nature of sequential effects in the more naturalistic setting of automobile driving. Driving is a safety-critical task in which delayed response times may have severe consequences. Using a realistic driving simulator, we find significant sequential effects in pedal-press response times that depend on the history of recent stimuli and responses. Response times are slowed up to 100 ms in particular cases, a delay that has dangerous practical consequences. Further, we observe a significant number of history-related pedal misapplications, which have recently been noted as a cause for concern in the automotive safety community. By anticipating these consequences of sequential context, driver assistance systems could mitigate the effects of performance degradations and thus critically improve driver safety.

An integrative, experience-based theory of attentional control.

Although diverse, theories of visual attention generally share the notion that attention is controlled by some combination of three distinct strategies: (1) exogenous cuing from locally contrasting primitive visual features, such as abrupt onsets or color singletons (e.g., L. Itti, C. Koch, & E. Neiber, 1998), (2) endogenous gain modulation of exogenous activations, used to guide attention to task-relevant features (e.g., V. Navalpakkam & L. Itti, 2007; J. Wolfe, 1994, 2007), and (3) endogenous prediction of likely locations of interest, based on task and scene gist (e.g., A. Torralba, A. Oliva, M. Castelhano, & J. Henderson, 2006). However, little work has been done to synthesize these disparate theories. In this work, we propose a unifying conceptualization in which attention is controlled along two dimensions: the degree of task focus and the contextual scale of operation. Previously proposed strategies-and their combinations-can be viewed as instances of this one mechanism. Thus, this theory serves not as a replacement for existing models but as a means of bringing them into a coherent framework. We present an implementation of this theory and demonstrate its applicability to a wide range of attentional phenomena. The model accounts for key results in visual search with synthetic images and makes reasonable predictions for human eye movements in search tasks involving real-world images. In addition, the theory offers an unusual perspective on attention that places a fundamental emphasis on the role of experience and task-related knowledge.