Parallel Belief States account for Learning and Updating of Attentional Priorities in Multidimensional Environments

Inferring the behavioral relevance of visual features is difficult in multidimensional environments as many features could be important. One solution could involve tracking the experience with multiple features and using attentional control to decide which subset of features to explore and chose. Here, we characterize this attentional control process with a model of parallel belief states and test it with a task requiring the learning and updating of attention to features with varying selection histories and motivational costs. We found that exploring and exploiting features was accounted for by a model that tracks the latent beliefs about the relevance of multiple features in parallel. These parallel belief states accounted for the fast learning of feature-based attention, for perseverative selection history effects for features that were previously relevant, and for enhanced learning performance when the motivational costs of making errors increased. Taken together, these results quantify how multiple parallel belief states guide exploration and exploitation of feature-based attention during learning. We suggest parallel belief states represent attentional priorities that are read out by a competitive attentional control process to explore and exploit those visual objects in multidimensional environments that are believed to be relevant. Significance statementDuring goal-directed behavior attention is allocated to features relevant for the behavioral goal. But in real-world settings with multidimensional objects, it is often unknown which features are maximally relevant and should be attentionally prioritized. We found a solution to this problem by quantifying the hidden beliefs about the relevance of multiple features in parallel. By tracking belief states about feature relevance we found that subjects consider multiple features in parallel during the learning of feature-based attention. These belief states correspond to attentional priorities and explained when attention is biased towards previously relevant but now irrelevant features, and when learning about relevant features is enhanced by motivational incentives. These findings quantify the parallel hidden beliefs that guide attention in complex environments.