Factors impacting emergence of behavioral control by underselected stimuli in humans after reduction of control by overselected stimuli.
When overselectivity is strong, a brief reward for noticing a new cue next to the old one can unlock control by previously ignored parts of the task.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with neurotypical adults in a lab.
They first created strong overselectivity: one part of a picture controlled all choices.
Then, while the overselected part stayed on screen, they briefly paid people for picking a brand-new picture.
Finally, they checked if the old, ignored parts of the original picture now guided choices.
What they found
Paying for the new picture worked, but only when overselectivity was very strong at the start.
After that short step, participants suddenly followed parts of the picture they had never used before.
How this fits with other research
Gomes‐Ng et al. (2023) repeated the idea 13 years later. They used extinction instead of reinforcement and saw the same rule: the trick helps highly overselective learners but can hurt low-overselective ones.
Farmer-Dougan et al. (1999) showed you can do the same thing by prompting kids to point to every part of the picture. Their tactic worked right away, yet the benefit vanished when prompts stopped.
Bickel et al. (1984) warned us not to call it "restricted attention." They said control is stacked like a ladder; the 2010 study proves the ladder can be climbed with one quick reinforcer.
Why it matters
If a client with ASD or ID locks onto one cue, first probe how strong the lock is. If it is severe, flash in a new, easy reward next to the locked cue for a few trials, then retest the ignored cues. This five-minute move can pop hidden stimulus control without long extinction or extra prompts.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Stimulus overselectivity occurs when only one of potentially many aspects of the environment controls behavior. Adult participants were trained and tested on a trial-and-error discrimination learning task while engaging in a concurrent load task, and overselectivity emerged. When responding to the overselected stimulus was reduced by reinforcing a novel stimulus in the presence of the previously overselected stimulus in a second trial-and-error discrimination task, behavioral control by the underselected stimulus became stronger. However, this result was only found under certain circumstances: when there was substantial overselectivity in the first training phase; when control by the underselected stimulus in the first phase was particularly low; and when there was effective reduction in the behavioral control exerted by the previously overselected stimuli. The emergence of behavioral control by the underselected stimulus suggests that overselectivity is not simply due to an attention deficit, because for the emergence to occur, the stimuli must have been attended to and learned about in the training phase; but that a range of additional learning factors may play a role.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2010 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2010.94-125