The spillover effects of attentional learning on value-based choice

What role does attention play in decision-making? Prior research has demonstrated a link between visual attention and value-based choice, but the direction of causality is still unclear. Here we aimed to demonstrate that attention has a causal influence on choice. We tested whether spatially biasing attention in a visual search task would produce choice biases in a later choice task. We ran four experiments where the search target was more likely to appear on one "rich" side of the screen. In the subsequent choice tasks, participants were more likely to choose items appearing on the rich side and the average choice bias depended on how well participants learned the regularity in the search task. Additionally, eye-tracking data revealed a first-fixation bias toward the rich side, which in turn influenced choices. Taken together, these results provide novel support for a causal effect of attention on choice.