Learning to avoid looking: Competing influences of reward on overt attentional selection
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BRIEF REPORT
Learning to avoid looking: Competing influences of reward on overt attentional selection Daniel Pearson 1,2
&
Mike E. Le Pelley 2
Published online: 30 June 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Pairing a stimulus with large reward increases the likelihood that it will capture attention and eye-gaze, even when such capture has negative consequences. This suggests that a stimulus’s signalling relationship with reward (the co-occurrence of that stimulus and reward) has a powerful influence on attentional selection. In the present study, we demonstrate that a stimulus’s response relationship with reward (the reward-related consequences of attending to that stimulus) can also exert an independent, competing influence on selection. Participants completed a visual search task in which they made a saccade to a target shape to earn reward. The colour of a distractor signalled the magnitude of reward available on each trial. For one group of participants, there was a negative response relationship between making a saccade to the distractor and reward delivery: looking at the distractor caused the reward to be cancelled. For a second group, there was no negative response relationship, but an equivalent distractor–reward signalling relationship was maintained via a yoking procedure. Participants from both groups were more likely to have their gaze captured by the distractor that signalled high reward versus low reward, demonstrating an influence of the signalling relationship on attention. However, participants who experienced a negative response relationship showed a reduced influence of signal value on capture, and specifically less capture by the high-reward distractor. These findings demonstrate that reward can have a multifaceted influence on attentional selection through different, learned stimulus-reward relationships, and thus that the relationship between reward and attention is more complex than previously thought. Keywords Attentional capture . Reward . Suppression . Cognitive control
Introduction Stimuli that signal large reward are more likely to capture attention and gaze than stimuli that signal lesser or no reward – a phenomenon named value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC; for reviews, see Anderson, 2016; Failing & Theeuwes, 2018; Le Pelley, Mitchell, Beesley, George, & Wills, 2016; Watson, Pearson, Wiers, & Le Pelley, 2019). VMAC has been demonstrated even when capture is counterproductive, in that it results in the omission of reward that would otherwise be delivered. For example, in a study by Le Pelley, Pearson, Griffiths, and Beesley (2015), participants
* Daniel Pearson [email protected] 1
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP, England
2
School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
made a rapid eye movement to a shape-defined target on each trial to earn reward. The colour of a colour-singleton distractor signalled the magnitude of reward that could be earned for a rapid eye movement to the target on that
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