Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The deployment of selective attention has been studied in depth as a mechanism of visual categorization for decades. However, little work has investigated how attentional mechanisms operate for non-visual domains, and many models of categorization tacitly presume domain-general attention use. In three experiments, we investigated whether learners deploy attention to novel auditory features when learning novel words in a similar fashion to the prevailing visual categorization findings. These studies yielded evidence of non-isomorphism, as selective attention in the auditory domain shows high context specificity, in contrast to the wide generalization of attention in the visual domain.