Attention shifts to more complex locations with experience
Our environments are saturated with learnable information. What determines which of this information gets prioritized for limited attentional resources? While previous studies suggest that learners prefer medium complexity information, here we argue that what counts as medium should change as someone learns an input's structure. Specifically, we examined the hypothesis that attention is directed towards more complicated structures as learners gain more experience with the environment. Participants watched four simultaneous streams of information which varied in complexity. Reaction times to intermittent search trials (Ex. 1, N=75) and eye-tracking (Ex. 2, N=45) indexed where participants attended over the experiment. Using a subject- and trial-specific measure of complexity, we demonstrated that participants attended to increasingly complex streams over time. Individual differences in structure learning also modulated attention allocation, with better learners attending to complex structures from earlier in learning, suggesting the ability to prioritize different information over time gates structure learning success.