Reward history modulates attention based on feature relationship

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Prioritizing attention to reward-predictive cues is vital for survival.
• Attention selection is often challenged by varying item features and environments.
• The adaptive tuning of attention to context-dependent relative features of rewarded items is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if attention can be adaptively tuned to items matching the context-dependent, relative feature of previously rewarded items.
• To explore the flexibility of value-driven attention through feature relationships.

Main Methods:

• Four experiments trained participants on color-reward associations.
• Visual search tasks were employed using singleton distractors.
• Distractor colors matched either the feature value or feature relationship of previously rewarded colors.

Main Results:

• Enhanced attentional capture by distractors relationally matched to high-reward contexts was observed.
• A typical effect of learned value on distractors matching previously rewarded colors was also found.
• Findings suggest attention can be flexibly tuned via feature relationships.

Conclusions:

• Value-driven attention is flexible and can be guided by feature relationships.
• This adaptive attention mechanism is beneficial for real-world searches with changing sensory inputs.
• The study provides novel evidence for adaptive attentional control based on relative reward value.