Neuroscience Department, Laboratory for Behavioral Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland; Coma Science Group, GIGA Consciousness, University and University Hospital of Liège, Liège, Belgium.
Neuroscience Department, Laboratory for Behavioral Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Nov;120:105-112. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.10.014. Epub 2018 Oct 18.
A growing body of evidence suggests that reward may be a powerful determinant of attentional selection. To date, the study of value-based attentional capture has been mainly focused on the visual sensory modality. It is yet unknown how reward information is communicated and integrated across the different senses in order to resolve between competing choices during selective attention. Our study investigated the interference produced by an auditory reward-associated distractor when a semantically-related visual target was concurrently presented. We measured both manual and saccadic response times towards a target image (drum or trumpet), while an irrelevant sound (congruent or incongruent instrument) was heard. Each sound was previously associated with either a high or a low reward. We found that manual responses were slowed by a high-reward auditory distractor when sound and image were semantically congruent. A similar effect was observed for saccadic responses, but only for participants aware of the past reward contingencies. Auditory events associated with reward value were thus capable of involuntarily capturing attention in the visual modality. This reward effect can mitigate cross-modal semantic integration and appears to be differentially modulated by awareness for saccadic vs. manual responses. Together, our results extend previous work on value-driven attentional biases in perception by showing that these may operate across sensory modalities and override cross-modal integration for semantically-related stimuli. This study sheds new light on the potential implication of brain regions underlying value-driven attention across sensory modalities.
越来越多的证据表明，奖励可能是注意力选择的一个强有力的决定因素。迄今为止，基于价值的注意力捕获的研究主要集中在视觉感觉模态上。目前尚不清楚奖励信息是如何在不同感觉之间进行传递和整合的，以便在选择性注意中解决竞争选择之间的问题。我们的研究调查了当同时呈现语义相关的视觉目标时，听觉奖励相关分心物所产生的干扰。我们测量了手动和扫视反应时间，以响应目标图像（鼓或小号），同时听到无关声音（一致或不一致的乐器）。每个声音之前都与高或低奖励相关联。我们发现，当声音和图像语义一致时，高奖励听觉分心物会使手动反应减慢。对于扫视反应也观察到类似的效果，但仅对意识到过去奖励关系的参与者有效。因此，与奖励价值相关的听觉事件能够在视觉模态中不由自主地吸引注意力。这种奖励效应可以减轻跨模态语义整合，并且似乎通过对扫视与手动反应的意识来进行差异调节。总之，我们的研究结果通过表明这些注意力偏向可能在跨感觉模式中运作并覆盖语义相关刺激的跨感觉模式整合，扩展了之前关于感知中基于价值的注意力偏向的研究。这项研究为跨感觉模式下基于价值的注意力的大脑区域的潜在意义提供了新的线索。
