The matching law describes the allocation of behavior over a wide range of settings, including laboratory experimental chambers, forest foraging patches, sports arenas, and board games. Interestingly, matching persists in settings in which economic analyses predict quite different distributions of behavior (and it also differs systematically from “probability matching”). We tested whether the matching law also describes the allocation of covert cognitive processes. Sixty-four participants viewed two, small, vertically arranged adjacent stimuli that projected an image that fit within the fovea. A trial-version of the reward contingencies used in matching law experiments determined which stimulus was the target. The amount of time the stimuli were available was tailored to each subject so that they were not able to make use of the information in both stimuli even though an eye-tracking experiment confirmed that they saw both. The implication of this restriction is that subjects had to decide which stimulus to attend to prior to each trial. The only available objective basis for this decision was the relative frequencies that a stimulus was the target. Although shifts in attention were covert, and the procedure did not provide explicit reinforcers, the matching law equation described the division of attention between two small, briefly presented stimuli as accurately as it describes the allocation of key pecking between two illuminated disks in hungry pigeons.
Behavioral psychology’s matching law describes the allocation of covert attention: A choice rule for the mind.
