Behavioral psychology's matching law describes the allocation of covert attention: A choice rule for the mind.

Abstract

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 2, 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. For example, in 1 condition, the top stimulus was the target 3 times more frequently than the bottom stimulus. However, the amount of time the stimuli were available was tailored to each participant 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 participants 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. The matching law predicted the correlation between the relative frequency that a stimulus was the target and the proportion of trials that it was attended to. The results support the claim that the matching law is a general choice principle-one that describes the allocation of covert mental processes as well as overt behavioral responses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).