Cognitive Inertia: How Loops Among Attention, Representation, and Decision Making Distort Reality

The decisions we make in our everyday lives often require us to navigate through a barrage of information, so that we can base our decisions only on information that is relevant to our goals. Selectively attending only to goal-relevant dimensions of information can help us efficiently navigate this barrage of information, but can also lead us into ``traps" where we fail to learn which information is most relevant, or fail to notice information that becomes relevant later in time. Here, we investigate the dynamic interactions between attention, learning, and memory that unfold as learners seek to identify dimensions of information that will help them make consistently accurate decisions. Using a multi-pronged approach, we identify the cyclical links between decision making, attention, and representation that best explain human category learning. We then show how the structure of these relationships paradoxically causes both accelerated learning and leads learners into different types of learning traps.