Attention and salience in associative blocking

The associative learning effect called blocking has previously been found in many cue-competition paradigms where all cues are of equal salience. Previous research by Hall, Mackintosh, Goodall, and dal Martello (1977) found that, in animals, salient cues were less likely to be blocked. Crucially, they also found that when the to-be-blocked cue was highly salient, the blocking cue would lose some control over responding. The present article extends these findings to humans and suggests that shifts in attention can explain the apparent loss of control by the previously learned cue. A connectionist model that implements attentional learning is shown to fit the main trends in the data. Model comparisons suggest that mere forgetting, implemented as weight decay, cannot explain the results.     

The Unsettled Meaning of Undergraduate Education in a Competitive Higher Education Environment

Access to undergraduate education has expanded rapidly in recent years. This is one manifestation of a rise in the relative importance of market‐based resource allocation in higher education and a weakening of allocation based upon traditional views of merit. This change in priority has influenced the content of the undergraduate curriculum and introduced both content and methods whose legitimacy and educational value some question as universities market their products to attract enrolment. The paper discusses the relationship between allocation mechanism and “curriculum as product” and examines critically some of the more significant implications for undergraduate education such as course rigour and full‐spectrum grading.