Instead, they attend to the topic the instructor has been discussing. One day, a car it has been chasing turns the corner and the dog's toes are a bit pinched by the tires. One crucial cognitive mechanism underlying people's ability to learn a lot quickly is rapid, learned shifting of selective attention among cues or features in a stimulus. By selectively attending to cues or features of a stimulus that do not conflict with previous learning, acquistion of new associations is enhanced, while prior learning is preserved.
Selective attention reduces both proactive and retroactive interference.
Moreover, selective attention is itself a stimulus specific, learned response. Associative learning consists of learning what cues to attend to in particular stimuli, and learning what response to make based on the attended-to cues. Research in my lab explores phenomena which reveal the psychological principles of attentional learning. Connectionist models are an especially rich formalism by which to express theoretical principles of associative learning. This approach allows us to discern which model mechanisms and corresponding theoretical principles are crucial in accounting for the data.