Irrelevant learned reward associations disrupt voluntary spatial attention

Attention can be guided involuntarily by physical salience and by non-salient, previously learned reward associations that are currently task-irrelevant. Attention can be guided voluntarily by current goals and expectations. The current study examined, in two experiments, whether irrelevant reward a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Attention, perception & psychophysics perception & psychophysics, 2016-10, Vol.78 (7), p.2241-2252
Main Authors: MacLean, Mary H., Diaz, Gisella K., Giesbrecht, Barry
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Association Learning
Attention
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Cues
Evidence
Female
Humans
Male
Psychology
Reaction Time
Reward
Spatial Processing
Stimuli
Studies
Visual task performance
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Summary:Attention can be guided involuntarily by physical salience and by non-salient, previously learned reward associations that are currently task-irrelevant. Attention can be guided voluntarily by current goals and expectations. The current study examined, in two experiments, whether irrelevant reward associations could disrupt current, goal-driven, voluntary attention. In a letter-search task, attention was directed voluntarily (i.e., cued) on half the trials by a cue stimulus indicating the hemifield in which the target letter would appear with 100 % accuracy. On the other half of the trials, a cue stimulus was presented, but it did not provide information about the target hemifield (i.e., uncued). On both cued and uncued trials, attention could be involuntarily captured by the presence of a task-irrelevant, and physically non-salient, color, either within the cued or the uncued hemifield. Importantly, one week prior to the letter search task, the irrelevant color had served as a target feature that was predictive of reward in a separate training task. Target identification accuracy was better on cued compared to uncued trials. However, this effect was reduced when the irrelevant, and physically non-salient, reward-associated feature was present in the uncued hemifield. This effect was not observed in a second, control experiment in which the irrelevant color was not predictive of reward during training. Our results indicate that involuntary, value-driven capture can disrupt the voluntary control of spatial attention.
ISSN:1943-3921
1943-393X
DOI:10.3758/s13414-016-1103-x