Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
School of Psychological Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Elife. 2020 Nov 17;9:e60705. doi: 10.7554/eLife.60705.
When choosing between options, such as food items presented in plain view, people tend to choose the option they spend longer looking at. The prevailing interpretation is that visual attention increases value. However, in previous studies, 'value' was coupled to a behavioural goal, since subjects had to choose the item they preferred. This makes it impossible to discern if visual attention has an effect on value, or, instead, if attention modulates the information most relevant for the goal of the decision-maker. Here, we present the results of two independent studies-a perceptual and a value-based task-that allow us to decouple value from goal-relevant information using specific task-framing. Combining psychophysics with computational modelling, we show that, contrary to the current interpretation, attention does not boost value, but instead it modulates goal-relevant information. This work provides a novel and more general mechanism by which attention interacts with choice.
当在选项之间进行选择时，例如在眼前呈现的食物选项，人们往往会选择他们看的时间更长的那个选项。主流的解释是视觉注意力会增加价值。然而，在之前的研究中，“价值”与行为目标相关联，因为受试者必须选择他们更喜欢的物品。这使得我们无法辨别是视觉注意力对价值有影响，还是注意力调节了对决策者目标最相关的信息。在这里，我们提出了两项独立研究的结果——一项是基于感知的，一项是基于价值的任务——使用特定的任务框架，我们可以将价值与目标相关信息分离开来。通过将心理物理学与计算建模相结合，我们表明，与当前的解释相反，注意力不会提高价值，而是调节与目标相关的信息。这项工作提供了一个新颖的、更普遍的机制，通过这个机制，注意力与选择相互作用。
