Top-down motivation both decreases and increases feature interference following a saccade

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Visual Perception
• Attention Studies

Background:

• Spatial attention is dynamic, not static, in real-world scenarios.
• Shifts in attention and eye movements (saccades) can cause feature-binding errors in perception.
• It remains unclear if these errors are controllable via top-down motivation or are automatic byproducts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether top-down control, induced by performance-contingent rewards, can mitigate feature-binding errors following saccades.
• To determine if feature interference reflects a flexible response to motivation or an automatic consequence of attentional remapping.

Main Methods:

• A preregistered experiment with 40 healthy adults reporting item color at cued locations.
• Participants performed a saccade followed by a brief visual array presentation.
• Monetary incentives were varied across blocks to manipulate top-down motivation levels.

Main Results:

• Higher rewards improved overall performance and reduced retinotopic mixing errors post-saccade.
• Conversely, increased motivation led to more retinotopic swapping errors early after saccades.
• This suggests distinct effects of motivation on different attentional remapping subprocesses.

Conclusions:

• Motivation differentially affects distinct attentional mechanisms involved in spatial remapping across saccades.
• Retinotopic swapping errors may stem from structural limitations in attentional remapping.
• Findings offer novel insights into top-down control in dynamic spatial attention and visual perception.