Reward-driven attention alters perceived salience

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Abstract

Many studies have revealed that reward-associated features capture attention. Neurophysiological evidence further suggests that this reward-driven attention effect modulates visual processes by enhancing low-level visual salience. However, no behavioral study to date has directly examined whether reward-driven attention changes how people see. Combining the two-phase paradigm with a psychophysical method, the current study found that compared with nonsalient cues associated with lower reward, the nonsalient cues associated with higher reward captured more attention, and increased the perceived contrast of the subsequent stimuli. This is the first direct behavioral evidence of the effect of reward-driven attention on low-level visual perception.

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The Psychophysics Toolbox.

D Brainard (1997)

The Psychophysics Toolbox is a software package that supports visual psychophysics. Its routines provide an interface between a high-level interpreted language (MATLAB on the Macintosh) and the video display hardware. A set of example programs is included with the Toolbox distribution.

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The VideoToolbox software for visual psychophysics: transforming numbers into movies.

D. Pelli (1997)

The VideoToolbox is a free collection of two hundred C subroutines for Macintosh computers that calibrates and controls the computer-display interface to create accurately specified visual stimuli. High-level platform-independent languages like MATLAB are best for creating the numbers that describe the desired images. Low-level, computer-specific VideoToolbox routines control the hardware that transforms those numbers into a movie. Transcending the particular computer and language, we discuss the nature of the computer-display interface, and how to calibrate and control it.

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Value-driven attentional capture.

Brian Anderson, Patryk A Laurent, Steven Yantis (2011)

Attention selects which aspects of sensory input are brought to awareness. To promote survival and well-being, attention prioritizes stimuli both voluntarily, according to context-specific goals (e.g., searching for car keys), and involuntarily, through attentional capture driven by physical salience (e.g., looking toward a sudden noise). Valuable stimuli strongly modulate voluntary attention allocation, but there is little evidence that high-value but contextually irrelevant stimuli capture attention as a consequence of reward learning. Here we show that visual search for a salient target is slowed by the presence of an inconspicuous, task-irrelevant item that was previously associated with monetary reward during a brief training session. Thus, arbitrary and otherwise neutral stimuli imbued with value via associative learning capture attention powerfully and persistently during extinction, independently of goals and salience. Vulnerability to such value-driven attentional capture covaries across individuals with working memory capacity and trait impulsivity. This unique form of attentional capture may provide a useful model for investigating failures of cognitive control in clinical syndromes in which value assigned to stimuli conflicts with behavioral goals (e.g., addiction, obesity).