Abstract
This study presents experimental evidence for a relationship between attentional orientation and associative learning. Learning to establish contingencies between warning signals and subsequent task stimuli is a phenomenon which we know from previous studies to be more associated with the left hemisphere. We investigated how hemispheric priming, i.e., activating one hemisphere by directing attention towards the contralateral hemispace, affected both the rate and the extent of associative and nonassociative learning. When attention was directed towards the right while perceiving a discrimination task stimulus, the rate of learning through contingency formation was increased since the relative activation of the left hemisphere was increased. Such a relationship was not found for relative activation of the right hemisphere following leftward orientation of attention.
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