Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, England.
School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2020 Oct;27(5):998-1005. doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01770-3.
Pairing a stimulus with large reward increases the likelihood that it will capture attention and eye-gaze, even when such capture has negative consequences. This suggests that a stimulus's signalling relationship with reward (the co-occurrence of that stimulus and reward) has a powerful influence on attentional selection. In the present study, we demonstrate that a stimulus's response relationship with reward (the reward-related consequences of attending to that stimulus) can also exert an independent, competing influence on selection. Participants completed a visual search task in which they made a saccade to a target shape to earn reward. The colour of a distractor signalled the magnitude of reward available on each trial. For one group of participants, there was a negative response relationship between making a saccade to the distractor and reward delivery: looking at the distractor caused the reward to be cancelled. For a second group, there was no negative response relationship, but an equivalent distractor-reward signalling relationship was maintained via a yoking procedure. Participants from both groups were more likely to have their gaze captured by the distractor that signalled high reward versus low reward, demonstrating an influence of the signalling relationship on attention. However, participants who experienced a negative response relationship showed a reduced influence of signal value on capture, and specifically less capture by the high-reward distractor. These findings demonstrate that reward can have a multifaceted influence on attentional selection through different, learned stimulus-reward relationships, and thus that the relationship between reward and attention is more complex than previously thought.
当刺激物与大奖励配对时，即使这种捕获有负面后果，它也更有可能引起注意和目光注视。这表明刺激物与奖励之间的信号关系（即该刺激物和奖励的同时出现）对注意力选择具有强大的影响。在本研究中，我们证明了刺激物与奖励之间的反应关系（即关注该刺激物的奖励相关后果）也可以对选择产生独立的竞争影响。参与者完成了一项视觉搜索任务，他们需要注视目标形状以赚取奖励。分心物的颜色标志着每次试验可获得的奖励的大小。对于一组参与者，向分心物进行扫视与奖励交付之间存在负反应关系：注视分心物会导致奖励被取消。对于第二组参与者，没有负反应关系，但通过联接程序维持了等效的分心物-奖励信号关系。来自这两组的参与者更有可能被表示高奖励与低奖励的分心物吸引，这表明信号关系对注意力有影响。然而，经历负反应关系的参与者在信号值对捕获的影响较小，特别是对高奖励的分心物的捕获较小。这些发现表明，通过不同的、习得的刺激-奖励关系，奖励可以对注意力选择产生多方面的影响，因此奖励和注意力之间的关系比以前想象的要复杂。
