Past rewards capture spatial attention and action choices

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Behavioral Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Behavior is powerfully driven by the pursuit of rewards and avoidance of punishment.
• Understanding how past experiences, particularly reward history, shape attention and decision-making is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if a location's prior value (reward association) influences subsequent attention, both goal-directed and stimulus-driven.
• To determine if past reward history affects the capture of attention by irrelevant stimuli and the direction of voluntary actions.

Main Methods:

• Eye-tracking technology was used to monitor gaze position and measure stimulus-driven attention.
• Action choices were recorded in a goal-directed attention task.
• A covert attention task with button-press responses was also employed to assess attention shifts.

Main Results:

• Distractors at previously rewarded locations captured attention more effectively, even when current outcomes were punishing.
• Past reward history biased subsequent goal-directed attention and action choices towards those locations.
• Individuals more susceptible to reward history-based distraction also showed stronger biases in action choices.

Conclusions:

• Past reward associations significantly modulate both involuntary (stimulus-driven) and voluntary (goal-directed) attention.
• Maintaining outdated reward information can lead to negative consequences, increasing vulnerability to distraction and biased action choices.
• These findings offer insights into distractibility and abnormal action selection, highlighting potential short-term costs of reward-based behavioral regulation.