Value-driven attentional capture

Abstract

Attention selects which aspects of sensory input are brought to awareness. To promote survival and well-being, attention prioritizes stimuli both voluntarily, according to context-specific goals (e.g., searching for car keys), and involuntarily, through attentional capture driven by physical salience (e.g., looking toward a sudden noise). Valuable stimuli strongly modulate voluntary attention allocation, but there is little evidence that high-value but contextually irrelevant stimuli capture attention as a consequence of reward learning. Here we show that visual search for a salient target is slowed by the presence of an inconspicuous, taskirrelevant item that was previously associated with monetary reward during a brief training session. Thus, arbitrary and otherwise neutral stimuli imbued with value via associative learning capture attention powerfully and persistently during extinction, independently of goals and salience. Vulnerability to such valuedriven attentional capture covaries across individuals with working memory capacity and trait impulsivity. This unique form of attentional capture may provide a useful model for investigating failures of cognitive control in clinical syndromes in which value assigned to stimuli conflicts with behavioral goals (e.g., addiction, obesity).E ffective deployment of attention is critical to the successful performance of any cognitive task. Attention determines what aspects of the sensory input are selected for cognitive processing, memory storage, and awareness. Two modes of attentional control are widely believed to determine perceptual priority: a voluntary, goal-directed mode, in which attention is guided by contextually appropriate goals and intentions, and an involuntary, stimulus-driven mode, in which attention is captured by physically salient stimuli (1-4) or by task-irrelevant stimuli that share identifying features with a searched-for target (5, 6). Each of these modes of control present concomitant benefits and costs: voluntary control of attention is goal-specific but potentially slower to implement; involuntary attentional capture can rapidly orient the organism to unexpected changes that could signal danger or opportunity, but has the potential to cause distraction from intended acts of perception.Goal-directed and stimulus-driven modes of attentional control have long been a focus of intense investigation, and much has been learned about the operating principles of each mode of control and their interaction (1, 4). However, there is growing evidence that these are not the only influences on attentional deployment. To promote survival and well-being, the brain is optimized to learn about perceptual stimuli that signal the potential for procuring reward (7,8). Voluntary attention to stimuli that predict reward is an effective mechanism for efficiently selecting valuable stimuli (9). Many studies have shown that reward facilitates voluntary attention to task-relevant stimuli, and that reward-based strategies and priorities strongly influence attentional perf...

Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

“…More specifically, we demonstrated that stimuli associated with primary reward can involuntary orient spatial attention and that this modulation critically depends on the properties of the primary reward. These results are consistent with recent experiments testing the incentive salience hypothesis in humans, and showing involuntary attentional interference effects by rewardassociated cue (Anderson et al, 2011a(Anderson et al, , 2011bHickey & van Zoest, 2012;Hickey et al, 2010aHickey et al, , 2010bHickey et al, , 2011. Critically, our results also revealed that this attentional capture is independent of the stimuli's low-level perceptual characteristics.…”

“…This hypothesis has recently been tested in humans (Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011a, 2011bHickey, Chelazzi, & Theeuwes, 2010a, 2010b, 2011. In Anderson et al (2011aAnderson et al ( ), (2011b, a simple visual stimulus (i.e., a one-color shape) was associated with a secondary reward (i.e., a visual monetary symbol).…”

“…In Anderson et al (2011aAnderson et al ( ), (2011b, a simple visual stimulus (i.e., a one-color shape) was associated with a secondary reward (i.e., a visual monetary symbol). Subsequently, the same shape was used as a distractor in trials of a visual search paradigm: if the reward-associated shape was present between the distractors, then voluntary target detection was delayed.…”

Automaticity and cognitive control in the learned predictiveness effect.

“…This means that distractor effects, such as the one observed here, appear to emerge outside of volitional control. In combination with previous findings showing an effect of prior learning on the ability of distractors to cause interference (Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011a, 2011bDella Libera & Chelazzi, 2009;Le Pelley, Vadillo, & Luque, 2013), this finding suggests that learning can influence the properties of the bottom-up processing of a stimulus to the extent that its ability to compete for attention is affected. This is an idea further clarified in later stages of this chapter.…”

“…Subsequent work has replicated this basic effect under a number of conditions (Anderson et al, 2011b;Hickey, Chelazzi, & Theeuwes, 2010a;2011;Le Pelley, Pearson, Griffiths, & Beesley, 2015).…”