Watson Poppy, Pearson Daniel, Theeuwes Jan, Most Steven B, Le Pelley Mike E
School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Australia.
School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Australia.
Cognition. 2020 Feb;195:104125. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104125. Epub 2019 Nov 18.
Attention refers to the set of cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the prioritization of incoming sensory information. Existing research suggests that motivationally salient stimuli, such as those associated with reward, are prioritized by the attention system and that this prioritization occurs independently of an observer's goals. Specifically, studies of visual search have shown that stimuli signalling the availability of monetary reward are more likely to capture eye movements, even when participants are motivated to ignore such stimuli. In the current study we ask whether reward magnitude influences only the likelihood that stimuli will capture spatial attention, or whether reward also influences the ease with which people can disengage attention from a location when they are motivated to move their attention elsewhere. Three experiments examined the time taken to disengage from a centrally presented distractor that signalled the availability of high or low reward. We found that participants took longer to move their eyes away from a high-reward distractor, even though this came at financial cost (Experiment 1), that participants were unable to suppress a high-reward distractor consistently presented at the central location (Experiment 2), that slower responding was not due to behavioural freezing in the presence of a signal of high reward (Experiment 3), and that slower responding persisted even when rewards were no longer available (Experiment 4). These results indicate that reward modulates attentional disengagement: signals of high reward hold attention for longer, even when this is counterproductive for performance of ongoing tasks. Our findings further highlight the role of reward in the conflict between automatic and goal-directed attentional processing.
注意力是指促进对传入感官信息进行优先级排序的认知机制集合。现有研究表明，动机上显著的刺激，如与奖励相关的刺激，会被注意力系统优先处理，且这种优先级排序的发生独立于观察者的目标。具体而言，视觉搜索研究表明，即使参与者被激励忽略此类刺激，表明有金钱奖励的刺激也更有可能吸引眼球运动。在本研究中，我们探讨奖励大小是否仅影响刺激捕获空间注意力的可能性，或者奖励是否还会影响当人们被激励将注意力转移到其他地方时，他们将注意力从一个位置脱离的难易程度。三项实验考察了从中央呈现的、表明有高或低奖励的干扰物上脱离所需的时间。我们发现参与者将目光从高奖励干扰物上移开所需的时间更长，即使这会带来经济成本（实验1）；参与者无法持续抑制在中央位置持续呈现的高奖励干扰物（实验2）；反应变慢并非由于在高奖励信号出现时行为冻结（实验3）；即使奖励不再可用，反应变慢的情况仍然存在（实验4）。这些结果表明奖励会调节注意力的脱离：高奖励信号会使注意力保持更长时间，即使这对正在进行的任务表现产生不利影响。我们的研究结果进一步凸显了奖励在自动和目标导向注意力加工之间的冲突中所起的作用。
