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Oculomotor capture is influenced by expected reward value but (maybe) not predictiveness
Mike E Le Pelley1, Daniel Pearson1, Alexis Porter1
1School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|April 5, 2017
Summary
Learned attention is driven by a stimulus's associative value, not just its predictiveness. This finding suggests that the subjective value of expected rewards guides attentional prioritization in visual search tasks.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Decision Science
Background:
- Learned associations between neutral stimuli and significant outcomes (rewards/punishments) influence future attention.
- Existing theories differ on whether stimulus predictiveness or associative value drives these attentional changes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether attentional capture is influenced by stimulus predictiveness or absolute associative value.
- To differentiate between two key accounts of learned attention using empirical evidence.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments employed eye-tracking technology.
- A rewarded visual search paradigm was utilized to measure attentional responses.
- Stimuli varied in their predictiveness and associative value.
Main Results:
- Stimuli with higher associative value more strongly captured eye-movements.
- Evidence for a distinct influence of stimulus predictiveness on attentional capture was weak.
- Attentional capture demonstrated a clear dependence on the expected incentive value of predicted outcomes.
Conclusions:
- Attentional prioritization is primarily determined by the expected subjective value of a stimulus-predicted reward.
- Associative value, rather than pure predictiveness, appears to be the critical factor in learned attention.
- Findings support a unified account where attention scales monotonically with reward value.