Attention in the acquisition and expression of automaticity

The instance theory of automaticity claims that people learn what they attend to and express what they learned in transfer if they attend to the same things in the same way. These hypotheses were tested in 8 category search experiments in which target position was cued by color (red or green). The main question was whether target color would be encoded in training and retrieved in transfer. After training, recognition memory for target color was above chance, which suggests that color was encoded. However, category search performance was not affected by changing target color unless color was reported explicitly during training and transfer, which suggests that color was not always retrieved. The results are consistent with the instance theory. The distinction between encoding and retrieval is important in understanding the acquisition and expression of automaticity. Automatic performance emphasizes speed and so may not be sensitive to things that are retrieved slowly.