Learning permits even relatively uninteresting stimuli to capture attention if they are established as predictors of important outcomes. Associative theories explain this "learned predictiveness" effect by positing that attention is a function of the relative strength of the association between stimuli and outcomes. In three experiments we show that this explanation is incomplete: learned overt visual-attention is not a function of the relative strength of the association between stimuli and an outcome. In three experiments, human participants were exposed to triplets of stimuli that comprised (a) a target (that defined correct responding), (b) a stimulus that was perfectly correlated with the presentation of the target, and (c) a stimulus that was uncorrelated with the presentation of the target. Participants' knowledge of the associative relationship between the correlated or uncorrelated stimuli and the target was always good. However, eye-tracking revealed that an attentional bias toward the correlated stimulus only developed when it and target-relevant responding preceded the target stimulus. We propose a framework in which attentional changes are modulated during learning as a function the relative strength of the association between stimuli and the task-relevant response, rather than an association between stimuli and the task-relevant outcome. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).