Stankevich Beth A, Geng Joy J
Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, 267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA, 95618, USA,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2014 Nov;76(8):2315-25. doi: 10.3758/s13414-014-0720-5.
Recent studies have shown that reward history acts as a powerful attentional bias, even overcoming top-down goals. This has led to the suggestion that rewards belong to a class of attentional cues based on selection history, which are defined by past outcomes with a stimulus feature. Selection history is thought to be separate from traditional attentional cues based on physical salience and voluntary goals, but there is relatively little understanding of how selection history operates as a mechanism of attentional selection. Critically, it has yet to be understood how multiple sources of selection history interact when presented simultaneously. For example, it may be easier to find something we like if it also appears in a predictable location. We therefore pitted spatial probabilities against reward associations and found that the two sources of information had independent and additive effects. Additionally, the strength of the two sources in biasing attentional selection could be equated. In contrast, while a nonpredictive but perceptually salient cue also exhibited independent and additive effects with reward, reward associations dominated the perceptually salient cue at all levels. Our data indicate that reward associations are part of a class of particularly potent attentional cues that guide behavior through learned expectations. However, selection history should not be thought of as a unitary concept but should be understood as a collection of independent sources of information that bias attention in a similar fashion.
最近的研究表明，奖励历史会产生强大的注意力偏差，甚至能克服自上而下的目标。这引发了一种观点，即奖励属于基于选择历史的一类注意力线索，这类线索由具有刺激特征的过去结果所定义。选择历史被认为与基于物理显著性和自愿目标的传统注意力线索不同，但对于选择历史作为一种注意力选择机制是如何运作的，人们了解相对较少。至关重要的是，目前尚不清楚当同时呈现多种选择历史来源时它们是如何相互作用的。例如，如果我们喜欢的东西也出现在可预测的位置，那么可能更容易找到它。因此，我们将空间概率与奖励关联进行了对比，发现这两种信息来源具有独立且累加的效应。此外，这两种来源在偏向注意力选择方面的强度可以等同。相比之下，虽然一个非预测性但在感知上显著的线索也与奖励表现出独立且累加的效应，但在各个层面上奖励关联都主导着感知上显著的线索。我们的数据表明，奖励关联是一类特别强大的注意力线索的一部分，它们通过习得的期望来引导行为。然而，不应将选择历史视为一个单一的概念，而应理解为以类似方式偏向注意力的一系列独立信息来源。
