Macaques preferentially attend to intermediately surprising information
New research from Celeste Kidd and her team was published in Biology Letters. The article "Macaques preferentially attend to intermediately surprising information" was co-authored by Shengyi Wu, Tommy Blanchard, Emily Meschke, Richard N. Aslin, Benjamin Y. Hayden and Celeste Kidd.
From the abstract:
Normative learning theories dictate that we should preferentially attend to informative sources, but only up to the point that our limited learning systems can process their content. Humans, including infants, show this predicted strategic deployment of attention. Here, we demonstrate that rhesus monkeys, much like humans, attend to events of moderate surprisingness over both more and less surprising events. They do this in the absence of any specific goal or contingent reward, indicating that the behavioural pattern is spontaneous. We suggest this U-shaped attentional preference represents an evolutionarily preserved strategy for guiding intelligent organisms toward material that is maximally useful for learning.
Read the full article here.