Eyetracking and selective attention in category learning

An eyetracking version of the classic Shepard, Hovland and Jenkins (1961) experiment was conducted. Forty years of research has assumed that category learning includes learning how to selectively attend to only those stimulus dimensions useful for classification. We confirmed that participants learned to allocate their attention optimally. However, we also found that neither associationist accounts of gradual learning nor hypothesis-testing accounts accurately predicted the pattern of eye movements leading up to successful learning. The implication of these results, and the use of eyetracking technology more generally, for categorization theory are discussed.