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Research was conducted on two selective attention systems in learning situations. The theoretical and experimental approaches are presented in a set of six papers. One paper considered directions in attention theory and five papers report experiments with pigeon and children subjects. The two attention systems are (1) coding response, which mediate selections from multidimensional stimulus arrays, and (2) managing responses which are precurrent behaviors essential for stimulus reception and organization. Three experiments used the conditional discrimination with multidimensional stimuli. One experiment studied the effects of discrimination histories on selective stimulus control in a conditional discrimination, a second experiment attempted to establish superordinate stimuls control of conditional discrimination performance, and a third, with human children subjects, examined the distracting effects of an irrelevant second dimension upon learning a conditional discrimination with one dimensional stimuli. A fourth experiment, derived from findings in two experiments above, measured stimulus control exercised by the negative stimulus in a simple discrimination acquired without errors. (Author)