Loss of precise auditory sampling as a sign of value-driven visual attentional capture

Conditioning sensory signals endows persistent salience that influences attention, even after they no longer connect with rewards. As distractors shape multisensory target processing, conditioning phenomena remain poorly understood in relation to continuous sensory encoding. We investigate the effects of value-driven attentional capture by visual cues on the ability to reliably phase-lock cortical activity to temporal modulations of sound in audiovisual (AV) displays. Listening to periodically-modulated sound, observers discriminated between two visual object streams flickering at different rates, searching for an AV match. Also in view were peripheral color cues, used to evaluate how they modulate participant tracking fidelity as a result of color-reward associative training. Behavioral and electroencephalography (EEG) recordings (N=31) show that performance impoverished in presence of colors previously associated with reward, and so did tracking reliability measured by phase locking of AV responses. Decreased temporal precision predicted participants' reward-driven distraction, evidencing the attentional shift away from the multimodal target timing structure. Loss of consistency was furthermore present in auditory response estimates, suggesting value-driven attentional capture withdraws cortical tracking fidelity across the senses. The findings are consistent with inter-modal competition at times when incentive salience cues overtake top-down tracking of multisensory streams connected in time.