An attention-based associative account of adjacent and nonadjacent dependency learning

We showed in five experiments that when participants are faced with materials embedding relations between both adjacent and nonadjacent elements, they learn exclusively the type of relations they had to actively process to meet the task demands, irrespective of the spatial contiguity of the paired elements. These results are consonant with the current theories positing that attention is a necessary condition for learning. More importantly, they provide support for a more radical conception in which the joint attentional processing of two events is also a sufficient condition to learn their relation. The well-documented effect of contiguity could be a by-product of the fact that attention generally focuses on contiguous events. This reappraisal considerably extends the scope of approaches based on associative or statistical processes.