Overt and covert attention to location-based reward.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Neuroscience
• Psychology

Background:

• Reward influences attentional orienting and spatial priority maps.
• Understanding the link between overt eye movements and covert attention is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate if spatial location-based reward associations transfer from overt eye movements to covert attention.
• Examine the mechanisms underlying the interplay between reward, spatial attention, and motor responses.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted involving overt and covert attention tasks with location-based rewards.
• Participants' eye movements and attentional responses were measured under different task conditions.

Main Results:

• Overt attentional learning showed improvements at differentially rewarded locations.
• Covert attention showed the least improvement at highly rewarded locations, suggesting a motivational link with eye movement responses.
• Removing fixation requirements in the second experiment eliminated this slowing and covert spatial priority.

Conclusions:

• Transfer of location-based reward associations is tied to the motor response used during learning.
• Attentional and task contexts can interfere with learned spatial priorities, indicating a dissociation between overt and covert attention mechanisms.