UC Berkeley

This dissertation presents empirical studies on how both informational utility and visual salience guide attention in learners across species. An individual may attend to something due to its usefulness for learning or due to its ’bright and shiny’ features like bold colors and high contrast. A long history of work in developmental psychology establishes these features as foundational organizing principles of the human attention system—both predict looking time even in infancy. Digital information environments increasingly leverage the psychology of attention to maximize engagement and ad revenue. In this dissertation I investigate these foundational mechanisms of attention in digital information environments. Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that engagement does not predict learning in young children, as adult observers strongly assume, with implications for education, policy, and technology design. We find that attentional capture due to visual salience can disrupt learning in young children, despite capturing more attention. In Chapter 4, we demonstrate that low-income children consume more low-quality media content using a novel tool to quantify a metric of problematic visual salience, flicker, and discuss the implications of this inequity on children’s learning. Chapter 5 investigates how media consumption preferences impact learning and processing in young adults. We find that processing is likely shaped by media consumption preferences, in line with an adaptive account of attentional bandwidth. Finally, Chapter 6 investigates how general informational utility is as an organizing principle of attention by testing a distantly related mammal, dogs. Children and nonhuman primates preferentially attend to events of intermediate surprisal, likely due to these events offering the greatest potential for learning, while dogs do not. This work investigates how attention interacts with technology engineered to capture and sustain attention, and demonstrates that the mechanism through which attention is captured may shape processing and learning. This dissertation provides a perspective on human attention in digital information environments and poses broader questions about the evolutionary origins of attention in supporting complex processes like curiosity and learning.