Learned value and predictiveness affect gaze but not figure assignment.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Visual Perception
• Learning and Memory

Background:

• Figure-ground segregation is crucial for visual perception, yet factors influencing it remain under investigation.
• The roles of attention and reward history in visual figure assignment are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if reward learning impacts figure assignment in a visual task.
• To examine if attention mediates the relationship between reward history and figure-ground organization.

Main Methods:

• Participants underwent a reward learning phase, associating shapes with different win/loss probabilities.
• A subsequent figure-ground task presented shapes with learned reward histories against each other.
• Behavioral responses in the figure-ground task were recorded to assess figure assignment.

Main Results:

• Participants successfully learned the reward contingencies associated with shapes.
• Learned reward associations reliably directed participants' attention toward optimal stimuli.
• Neither the learned reward history nor the subsequent attentional shifts significantly altered figure-ground segregation.

Conclusions:

• Reward learning and attention allocation do not directly influence how the brain organizes visual scenes into figures and grounds.
• The findings suggest that basic perceptual mechanisms of figure-ground segregation may be independent of reward-based learning and attention.