Kang Guanlan, Wang Lihui, Zhou Xiaolin
Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing, ChinaSchool of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing,
Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing, ChinaSchool of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing, ChinaBeijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Beijing, ChinaKey Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Beijing, ChinaPKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing,
J Vis. 2017 Jan 1;17(1):19. doi: 10.1167/17.1.19.
Previous studies have shown that reward can enhance cognitive control and reduce conflict in visual processing. Here we investigate (a) whether and how reward influences cross-modal conflict control and (b) how the shift of attention across modalities modulates the effect of reward on cross-modal conflict control. In four experiments, a cue indicating the reward availability of a given trial (reward vs. no reward) was presented prior to a target. The target was either a visual or an auditory letter, which was accompanied by a distracting letter from the other modality. The identity of the distracting letter was either the same as or different from the identity of the target letter (congruent vs. incongruent). When the cue modality was constant (Experiment 1) or changed across different experimental blocks (Experiment 3), the interference effect (i.e., the response time difference between incongruent and congruent trials) was smaller following a reward cue than a no-reward cue, suggesting that reward can reduce cross-modal conflict. In contrast, when the cue modality was changed trial-by-trial in an unpredictable way (Experiments 2 and 4), reward reduced cross-modal conflict only when the cue and the target were from different modalities and had a long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between them but not when they shared the same modality or had a short SOA between them. These results suggest that reward can facilitate cross-modal conflict resolution, and this effect may critically depend on both the preparatory state between the cue and the target and timing to initiate cognitive control.
以往的研究表明，奖励可以增强认知控制并减少视觉处理中的冲突。在此，我们研究：（a）奖励是否以及如何影响跨模态冲突控制；（b）跨模态注意力转移如何调节奖励对跨模态冲突控制的影响。在四项实验中，在呈现目标之前，先呈现一个提示，表明给定试验的奖励可用性（奖励与无奖励）。目标要么是一个视觉字母，要么是一个听觉字母，同时伴有来自另一种模态的干扰字母。干扰字母的身份与目标字母的身份相同或不同（一致与不一致）。当提示模态恒定（实验1）或在不同实验块中变化（实验3）时，与无奖励提示相比，奖励提示后的干扰效应（即不一致试验与一致试验之间的反应时间差）更小，这表明奖励可以减少跨模态冲突。相比之下，当提示模态以不可预测的方式逐次变化时（实验2和4），只有当提示和目标来自不同模态且它们之间有较长的刺激开始时间间隔（SOA）时，奖励才会减少跨模态冲突，而当它们共享相同模态或它们之间有较短的SOA时则不会。这些结果表明，奖励可以促进跨模态冲突解决，并且这种效应可能严重依赖于提示和目标之间的准备状态以及启动认知控制的时机。
