Meyer Kristin N, Sheridan Margaret A, Hopfinger Joseph B
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2020 Nov;82(8):3842-3862. doi: 10.3758/s13414-020-02130-y.
It has been robustly shown that stimuli with reward history receive attentional priority. However, the majority of this research tests reward history effects on attentional bias using similar tasks for both the reward learning phase and the unrewarded testing phase, which limits our understanding of how the effects of reward history generalize beyond the trained tasks and mental sets. Across two new experiments, the current study addresses these issues by first associating reward with a stimulus in a visual search paradigm, and then testing value-driven effects of that stimulus in untrained and unrewarded tasks, including a cueing paradigm, a go/no-go task, and a delay discounting task. Results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that history of reward association in a visual search task generalizes to value-driven attentional bias in a different attention paradigm (i.e., cueing), indicating these effects are indeed attributable to imbued value that can transfer to other tasks beyond that in which the reward was trained. The results of Experiment 2 demonstrate that in addition to eliciting attentional orienting on untrained tasks, reward history can lead to better inhibitory control in the go/no-go task. We find no evidence for reward history effects in the delay discounting task. Together, these experiments demonstrate that when the reward association task is in the attention domain, reward history modulates attentional priority, and this effect generalizes to untrained and unrewarded tasks that utilize both spatial and nonspatial attention.
已有充分证据表明，具有奖励历史的刺激会获得注意力优先。然而，大多数此类研究在奖励学习阶段和无奖励测试阶段都使用类似任务来测试奖励历史对注意力偏差的影响，这限制了我们对奖励历史效应如何推广到训练任务和思维定式之外的理解。在两项新实验中，本研究通过首先在视觉搜索范式中将奖励与一种刺激相关联，然后在未训练且无奖励的任务（包括提示范式、Go/No-Go任务和延迟折扣任务）中测试该刺激的价值驱动效应，来解决这些问题。实验1的结果表明，视觉搜索任务中的奖励关联历史会推广到不同注意力范式（即提示）中的价值驱动注意力偏差，这表明这些效应确实归因于可转移到奖励训练任务之外的其他任务的赋予价值。实验2的结果表明，奖励历史除了能在未训练任务中引发注意力定向外，还能在Go/No-Go任务中带来更好的抑制控制。我们在延迟折扣任务中未发现奖励历史效应的证据。总之，这些实验表明，当奖励关联任务处于注意力领域时，奖励历史会调节注意力优先级，并且这种效应会推广到利用空间和非空间注意力的未训练且无奖励的任务中。
