Selective attention: the effects of combining stimuli which control incompatible behavior.
Rewarding one stimulus feature can erase attention to competing features.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Pigeons pecked at disks that showed both color and tilt.
The birds had to pick the red disk no matter how it tilted.
Pecking red was always rewarded.
Pecking tilt was never rewarded.
The team ran this test 16 times to see if the birds would learn to ignore tilt.
What they found
The birds made almost zero mistakes.
They looked only at color and stopped noticing tilt.
Reinforcing one feature made the other feature disappear from view.
How this fits with other research
Thrailkill et al. (2025) later showed the same effect scales up.
They proved that higher reward rates pull even more attention to the chosen feature.
Shull (1971) asked a new question: what happens when you mix senses?
They found mixing sight and sound boosts responding more than using two sights.
Together these studies show you can steer attention by how you set the payoffs.
Why it matters
When a learner gets stuck on the wrong detail, reward the right one hard and steady.
The unwanted cue will fade on its own.
Use this trick to clean up messy stimulus control in any skill you teach.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Pick the key feature in your task, deliver dense praise or tokens for that feature only, and watch the other features lose control.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Four rhesus monkeys learned both a color and tilt discrimination. The stimuli were combined to produce incompatible behavior. The behavior controlled by one set of stimuli was reinforced until "errors" virtually disappeared. The stimuli were tested separately again. Sixteen replications of the entire procedure indicated that the stimuli producing "errors" were ignored.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1969 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1969.12-539