not necessarily of academic interest, but damned useful (and commercial).

Actually, I'm curious that isn't seen as an area of significan academic interest -- designing artificial systems around being efficient parsers of extraneous data. I recall that one of the major differences between Deep Blue and Deep Fritz in the Kasperov chess matches was precisely that Fritz was designed around not probing every last possible set of playable moves; that is, Deep Fritz was "learning to forget the right things".

It seems to me that understanding this mechanism and how it behaves in humans could have huge potential for opening up the understanding of general intelligence and cognition. And that's a very academic concern.