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, task-irrelevant 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 value-driven 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).

Fig. 1.

Sequence of trial events. (A) Targets during the training phase were defined by color (red or green, exactly one of which was present on each trial), and participants reported the identity of the line segment inside of the target (vertical or horizontal). Correct responses were followed by the delivery of monetary reward feedback. One of the target colors was followed by a high reward on 80% of the trials and a low reward on 20% of the trials; for the other target color, this mapping was reversed. (B) During the test phase, the target was defined as the unique shape, and no reward feedback was provided. On half of the trials, one of the nontarget items—the distractor—was rendered in the color of a formerly rewarded target (each color equally often).

Fig. 2.

Magnitude of value-driven attentional capture (indexed as response time when a high-value distractor was present minus response time when no distractor was present) as a function of visual working memory capacity following the long (yellow) and short (blue) training regimen. Pearson product-moment correlations for the long and short training experiments were −0.468 (P = 0.016) and −0.468 (P = 0.021), respectively.