In social learning, an individual benefits from interacting with its social environment, to acquire new competencies and skills. Social enhancement is a term used to classify all social influences on an individual's performance. An example of this is stimulus enhancement, where one or more individuals, present in a learner's environment, influence the learner's probability of exposure to one set of stimuli rather than others. The learner can take advantage of these enhancements to further reduce the amount of input it has to deal with, by paying attention. Attention is a collection of mechanisms that determine the significance of stimuli. We argue that attention and stimulus enhancement can be used as tools for learning, and discuss their individual and mutual contributions to learning. We present two preliminary, statistical approaches to the modelling of attention, and point out several issues, problems, and possibilities for further work that arise.
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