Schlagbauer Bernhard, Geyer Thomas, Müller Hermann J, Zehetleitner Michael
Department Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2014 Apr;76(3):669-74. doi: 10.3758/s13414-014-0668-5.
The influence of reward on cognitive processes including visual perception, spatial attention, and perceptual learning has become an increasingly important field of study in recent years. For example, Tseng and Lleras (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 75(2), 287-298, 2013) investigated whether reward has an effect on implicit learning of target-distractor arrangements in visual search-that is, contextual cueing (Chun & Jiang Cognitive Psychology, 36(1), 28-71, 1998). They found that reward expedited the development of the cueing effect-that is, the reaction time difference between repeated and nonrepeated displays. However, their analysis did not account for potential effects of reward on the learning of individual target locations-that is, probability cueing (Jiang, Swallow, & Rosenbaum Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 39, 285-297, 2013). The present study was a replication of Tseng and Lleras (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 75(2), 287-298, 2013) that took into account reward effects on configural and locational learning, as well. We found that reward led to performance gains even in baseline ("new") displays, which contained only repeated target, but not distractor, locations. Furthermore, contextual cueing was smaller, and not larger, in high- than in low-reward trials. We concluded that reward modulates probability, and not contextual, cueing, and that this mechanism can account for the findings of Tseng and Lleras.
近年来，奖励对包括视觉感知、空间注意力和知觉学习在内的认知过程的影响已成为一个日益重要的研究领域。例如，曾和耶拉斯（《注意力、感知与心理物理学》，第75卷第2期，第287 - 298页，2013年）研究了奖励是否对视觉搜索中目标 - 干扰项排列的内隐学习产生影响——即情境线索化（春和江《认知心理学》，第36卷第1期，第28 - 71页，1998年）。他们发现奖励加速了线索化效应的发展——即重复显示和非重复显示之间的反应时差异。然而，他们的分析没有考虑奖励对各个目标位置学习的潜在影响——即概率线索化（江、斯沃洛和罗森鲍姆《实验心理学杂志：人类感知与表现》，第39卷，第285 - 297页，2013年）。本研究是对曾和耶拉斯（《注意力、感知与心理物理学》，第75卷第2期，第287 - 298页，2013年）的重复，同时也考虑了奖励对构型和位置学习的影响。我们发现，即使在仅包含重复目标位置而非干扰项位置的基线（“新的”）显示中，奖励也能带来表现提升。此外，在高奖励试验中，情境线索化比低奖励试验中的更小，而非更大。我们得出结论，奖励调节概率线索化而非情境线索化，并且这一机制可以解释曾和耶拉斯的研究结果。
