BLOCKING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PHENOMENON IN THE HISTORY OF ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING THEORY: for over 40 years, blocking has inspired a whole generation of learning models. Blocking is part of a family of effects that are typically termed "cue competition" effects. Common amongst all cue competition effects is that a cue-outcome relation is poorly learned or poorly expressed because the cue is trai...

This article systematically explores cue integration within active touch. Our research builds upon a recently made distinction between position and force cues for haptic shape perception: when sliding a finger across a bumpy surface, the finger follows the surface geometry (position cue). At the same time, the finger is exposed to forces related to the slope of the surface (force cue). Experime...

The authors trained 2 homing pigeons (Columba livia) on a directed forgetting task with 3 cues: a remember cue that was followed by a memory test and the opportunity to obtain a reward, a forget cue that was not followed by a memory test or a reward, and a free-reward cue that was not followed by a memory test but was followed by a free reward. The authors examined the activity of single neuron...

The appearance of a stationary but irrelevant cue triggers a smooth eye movement away from the position of the cue in monkeys that have been trained extensively to smoothly track the motion of moving targets while not making saccades to the stationary cue. We have analyzed the parameters that regulate the size of the cue-evoked smooth eye movement and examined whether presentation of the cue ch...

In new microbial-biogeochemical models, microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) is often assumed to decline with increasing temperature. Under this assumption, soil carbon losses under warming are small because microbial biomass declines. Yet there is also empirical evidence that CUE may adapt (i.e., become less sensitive) to warming, thereby mitigating negative effects on microbial biomass. To a...

Previous cue integration studies have examined continuous perceptual dimensions (e.g., size) and have shown that human cue integration is well described by a normative model in which cues are weighted in proportion to their sensory reliability, as estimated from single-cue performance. However, this normative model may not be applicable to categorical perceptual dimensions (e.g., phonemes). In ...

Cue-Based Dialogue Act Classification Nick Webb Supervisors: Yorick Wilks & Mark Hepple In this thesis, we will address three research questions relating to the discovery and use of cue phrases for Dialogue Act classification. Cue phrases are single words, or combinations of words in phrases, that can serve as reliable indicators of some discourse function. In our case, we are looking to automa...

To examine the issue of whether attentional focus can split among noncontiguous locations, Wright and Richard (2003) used a multiple-cue display and found the validity effect for each of the multiple cues. However, they argued against the multiple foci account by claiming that the multiple-cue effect they obtained was stimulus-driven. We doubt whether their cues were indeed exogenous as they cl...

Attention to a feature enhances the sensory representation of that feature. Although much has been learned about the properties of attentional modulation when attending to a single feature, the effectiveness of attending to multiple features is not well understood. We investigated this question in a series of experiments using a color-detection task while varying the number of attended colors i...