Attentional theories of associative learning and categorization propose that learning about the predictiveness of a stimulus influences the amount of attention that is paid to that stimulus. Three experiments tested this idea by looking at the extent to which stimuli that had previously been experienced as predictive or nonpredictive in a…

In 5 experiments, results showed that when participants are faced with materials embedding relations between both adjacent and nonadjacent elements, they learn exclusively the type of relations they had to actively process in order to meet the task demands, irrespective of the spatial contiguity of the paired elements. These results are consonant…

The study sought to use Jensen's two-level theory of mental abilities to predict some hitherto unknown or unnoticed phenomena--facts about which the theory should yield clear-cut predictions and which are not as clearly predictable from other theories, though they may receive ad hoc explanations after the fact. From the two-level theory of mental…