Uncertainty modulates value-driven attentional capture
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Uncertainty modulates value-driven attentional capture Sang A Cho 1 & Yang Seok Cho 1 Accepted: 2 October 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract The majority of previous studies on the value modulation of attention have shown that the magnitude of value-driven attentional bias correlates with the strength of reward association. However, relatively little is known about how uncertainty affects valuebased attentional bias. We investigated whether attentional capture by previously rewarded stimuli is modulated by the uncertainty of the learned value without the influence of the strength of reward association. Participants were instructed to identify the line orientation in the target color circle. Importantly, each target color was associated with a different level of uncertainty by tuning the variation in reward delivery (Experiment 1) or reward magnitude (Experiment 2). Attentional interference for uncertainty-related distractors was greater than that for certainty distractors in Experiments 1 and 2. In addition, uncertaintyinduced attentional bias disappeared earlier than attentional bias for certainty. The study demonstrated that uncertainty modulates value-based attentional capture in terms of strength and persistence, even when the effect of expected value remains constant. Keywords Attentional capture . Attention: selective . Visual search
Introduction In an enriched environment containing various stimuli, attention is a vital cognitive function that plays an important role in the selective processing of some valuable input in the prioritization and rejection of meaningless or distracting stimuli. This attentional selection toward specific objects or locations operates based on voluntary factors, such as intentions or task goals, and involuntary factors, such as the physical salience of stimuli (Posner, 1980). Regarding involuntary attentional deployment, it has been suggested that attentional capture occurs according to the perceptual salience of stimuli (e.g., Theeuwes, 1992) or a top-down attentional control setting (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Johnston 1992). Recently, a considerable amount of research has found that involuntary attentional capture is also modulated by reward history. A reward-associated stimulus captures attention even when it is neither salient nor task-relevant (e.g., Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011, 2012, 2013; for review, see Anderson, 2013; Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012; Failing & Theeuwes, 2017). For example, in Anderson * Yang Seok Cho [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Korea University, 145 Anam-ro, Seongbuk-Gu, Seoul 02841, Korea
et al.’s (2011) experiment, participants were asked to perform different visual search tasks in two separate phases – training and testing. In the training phase, in which the target was defined as two colors among heterogeneously colored nontargets, one color was paired with a high-value reward more often than a low-value reward and vice versa for the other color. In the test phase, in which the target was defined as a
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