Reward history but not search history explains value-driven attentional capture

Abstract

In past years, an extensive amount of research has focused on how past experiences guide future attention. Humans automatically attend to stimuli previously associated with reward and stimuli that have been experienced during visual search, even when it is disadvantageous in present situations. Recently, the relationship between "reward history" and "search history" has been discussed critically. We review results from research on value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) with a focus on these two experience-based attentional selection processes and their distinction. To clarify inconsistencies, we examined VDAC within a design that allows a direct comparison with other mechanisms of attentional selection. Eighty-four healthy adults were trained to incidentally associate colors with reward (10 cents, 2 cents) or with no reward. In a subsequent visual search task, distraction by reward-associated and unrewarded stimuli was contrasted. In the training phase, reward signals facilitated performance. When these value-signaling stimuli appeared as distractors in the test phase, they continuously shaped attentional selection, despite their task irrelevance. Our findings clearly cannot be attributed to a history of target search. We conclude that once an association is established, value signals guide attention automatically in new situations, which can be beneficial or not, depending on the congruency with current goals.

Reward-Related Suppression of Neural Activity in Macaque Visual Area V4

“…However, this prediction is in agreement with a growing body of evidence in human psychophysics studies, which document exactly this type of disadvantageous attentional capture of nonsalient rewarded stimuli ( Libera and Chelazzi 2009 ; Hickey and Van Zoest 2012 ; Failing and Theeuwes 2017 ; Le Pelley et al. 2017 ; Marchner and Preuschhof 2018 ). This unconscious attentional capture can take place even after delays of several months from the original reward association event ( Anderson and Yantis 2013 ).…”

Value-driven attentional capture is modulated by the contents of working memory: An EEG study

“…Moreover, rewarded ($0.25 on 80% of correct responses trials and $0.10 on 20% of correct responses) and non-rewarded (always followed by $0.00) colors differed in certainty of the outcome during training, and results could be interpreted as reflecting uncertainty associations rather than reward. However, participants showed larger capture to rewarded stimuli even though their predictive value was lower, suggesting that attention bias toward stimuli with more certain outcomes (e.g., Marchner & Preuschhof, 2018) was not driving the results. Other studies, however, have reported attention bias towards less certain stimuli (e.g., Le Pelley et al, 2018), but even in that study reward association influenced attention bias to a greater degree than uncertainty.…”

Mid-level feature contributions to category-specific gaze guidance

“…Note here that our use of the terms Bbottom-up^and Btop-down^is distinct from our use of the terms Blow-levelâ nd Bhigh-level.^The idea that bottom-up guidance refers only to low-level, stimulus-driven attention is outdated and does not stand up to scrutiny (Anderson, 2013;Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012). It has been shown that high-level knowledge, such as memory of past reward associations (Anderson, 2013;Awh et al, 2012;Marchner & Preuschhof, 2018), also drives attention automatically in a Bbottom-up^manner. Thus, here we use the term Bbottom-up^to refer to this feedforward automatic mode of attentional guidance, and we use the term Btop-down^to refer to a more explicit mode of exploration.…”