Task-irrelevant abrupt onsets differentially impact value-related orienting and maintenance

Physically salient stimuli are potent influences on behavior, but their negative impacts can be reduced in the presence of explicit goal-related cues. Here, we investigated whether goal-related cues associated with value are capable of insulating information from task-irrelevant abrupt onsets during two stages of information processing. Abrupt onsets were shown either after attention-directing cues and before a target (Experiment 1) or after a target that is to be remembered for later report (Experiment 2). The cues indicated the value associated with upcoming target locations, and they were either different in value, indicating that one was more valuable than the other, or equal in value. In both experiments, subjects were instructed to report the target that would earn them the most points (Experiment 1) or money (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, performance suffered with equal cues, suggesting that orienting to multiple locations increases susceptibility to distraction from physically salient stimuli. In Experiment 2, the same pattern did not appear for abrupt onsets during the retention period; instead, the impact of the physically salient stimulus was dependent upon working memory capacity. The differential impact of abrupt onsets prior to (Experiment 1) and after (Experiment 2) encoding of value-related target locations suggest that physically salient task-irrelevant stimuli influence value-related information processing differently during orienting and maintenance.