Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

As we interact with the world, we learn how to allocate our attention effectively to achieve our goals. In this study, participants' eye movements were tracked as they engaged in a same-different task with novel stimuli. Participants then completed a goal-directed task using physical copies of the items. In the task, the goal-relevance of the attributes varied. This was followed by a second block of the same-different task. We analyzed how attention to the goal-relevant, goal-incidental, and goal-irrelevant attributes of the items shifted from the initial block of the same-different task to the second. The gaze patterns clearly distinguished between the goal-relevant and goal-irrelevant attributes. However, there was no distinction between the goal-relevant and goal-incidental attributes. We discuss the implications for understanding how goal-directed interactions shape attentional allocation and how this relates to what people learn about the items.