Department of Cognitive Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
J Neurosci. 2010 Aug 18;30(33):11096-103. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1026-10.2010.
Reward-related mesolimbic dopamine steers animal behavior, creating automatic approach toward reward-associated objects and avoidance of objects unlikely to be beneficial. Theories of dopamine suggest that this reflects underlying biases in perception and attention, with reward enhancing the representation of reward-associated stimuli such that attention is more likely to be deployed to the location of these objects. Using measures of behavior and brain electricity in male and female humans, we demonstrate this to be the case. Sensory and perceptual processing of reward-associated visual features is facilitated such that attention is deployed to objects characterized by these features in subsequent experimental trials. This is the case even when participants know that a strategic decision to attend to reward-associated features will be counterproductive and result in suboptimal performance. Other results show that the magnitude of visual bias created by reward is predicted by the response to reward feedback in anterior cingulate cortex, an area with strong connections to dopaminergic structures in the midbrain. These results demonstrate that reward has an impact on vision that is independent of its role in the strategic establishment of endogenous attention. We suggest that reward acts to change visual salience and thus plays an important and undervalued role in attentional control.
奖励相关的中脑边缘多巴胺促使动物行为自动趋近与奖励相关的物体，避免不太可能有益的物体。多巴胺理论表明，这反映了感知和注意力的潜在偏差，奖励增强了与奖励相关刺激的表现，从而更有可能将注意力集中在这些物体的位置上。我们使用男性和女性人类的行为和脑电测量来证明这一点。与奖励相关的视觉特征的感觉和感知处理得到促进，从而使注意力集中在具有这些特征的物体上，在随后的实验中也是如此。即使参与者知道关注奖励相关特征的策略决策会适得其反并导致次优表现，也是如此。其他结果表明，由奖励引起的视觉偏差的大小可以通过前扣带皮层对奖励反馈的反应来预测，前扣带皮层与中脑多巴胺能结构有很强的联系。这些结果表明，奖励对视觉的影响独立于其在自主注意力建立中的作用。我们认为，奖励的作用是改变视觉显著性，从而在注意力控制中发挥重要但被低估的作用。
