Anderson Brian A, Laurent Patryk A, Yantis Steven
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Vis cogn. 2012 Jan 1;20(6). doi: 10.1080/13506285.2012.679711.
Attention is the mechanism by which important or salient stimuli are selected for perceptual and cognitive processing. Which stimuli are attended has important implications for effective goal-directed behaviour, survival, and well-being. A growing body of evidence suggests that reward-predicting stimuli capture attention involuntarily. In previous studies, value-based attentional priority has been observed only when the formerly reward-related stimuli themselves were presented as targets or distractors. Here we show that stimulus-reward associations learned in one task generalize to different stimuli that share a defining feature (colour) in another task. Our results reveal a broad and flexible role for reward learning in modulating attentional priority.
注意力是一种机制，通过它重要或显著的刺激被选择用于感知和认知加工。被注意的刺激对于有效的目标导向行为、生存和幸福感具有重要意义。越来越多的证据表明，预测奖励的刺激会不由自主地吸引注意力。在先前的研究中，只有当先前与奖励相关的刺激本身作为目标或干扰项呈现时，才观察到基于价值的注意力优先级。在这里，我们表明在一项任务中学习到的刺激-奖励关联会推广到另一项任务中具有共同定义特征（颜色）的不同刺激上。我们的结果揭示了奖励学习在调节注意力优先级方面具有广泛而灵活的作用。
