Perception and Cognition Lab, European Neuroscience Institute Goettingen-A Joint Initiative of the University Medical Center Goettingen and the Max-Planck-Society, Goettingen, Germany.
Perception and Cognition Lab, European Neuroscience Institute Goettingen-A Joint Initiative of the University Medical Center Goettingen and the Max-Planck-Society, Goettingen, Germany; School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom.
Cortex. 2024 Oct;179:271-285. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2024.07.013. Epub 2024 Aug 22.
Reward value and selective attention both enhance the representation of sensory stimuli at the earliest stages of processing. It is still debated whether and how reward-driven and attentional mechanisms interact to influence perception. Here we ask whether the interaction between reward value and selective attention depends on the sensory modality through which the reward information is conveyed. Human participants first learned the reward value of uni-modal visual and auditory stimuli during a conditioning phase. Subsequently, they performed a target detection task on bimodal stimuli containing a previously rewarded stimulus in one, both, or neither of the modalities. Additionally, participants were required to focus their attention on one side and only report targets on the attended side. Our results showed a strong modulation of visual and auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) by spatial attention. We found no main effect of reward value but importantly we found an interaction effect as the strength of attentional modulation of the ERPs was significantly affected by the reward value. When reward effects were examined separately with respect to each modality, auditory value-driven modulation of attention was found to dominate the ERP effects whereas visual reward value on its own led to no effect, likely due to its interference with the target processing. These results inspire a two-stage model where first the salience of a high reward stimulus is enhanced on a local priority map specific to each sensory modality, and at a second stage reward value and top-down attentional mechanisms are integrated across sensory modalities to affect perception.
奖励价值和选择性注意都在处理的最早阶段增强了感觉刺激的表示。奖励驱动和注意机制是否以及如何相互作用以影响感知仍然存在争议。在这里，我们询问奖励价值和选择性注意之间的相互作用是否取决于传达奖励信息的感觉模态。人类参与者首先在一个调节阶段中学习单模态视觉和听觉刺激的奖励价值。随后，他们在包含以前在一种、两种或两种模态中都奖励过的刺激的双模态刺激上执行目标检测任务。此外，参与者需要将注意力集中在一侧，并且仅报告关注侧的目标。我们的结果显示，空间注意力强烈调节了视觉和听觉事件相关电位（ERP）。我们没有发现奖励价值的主要影响，但重要的是，我们发现了一个交互效应，因为 ERP 的注意力调节强度受到奖励价值的显著影响。当分别检查每个模态的奖励效应时，发现听觉价值驱动的注意力调节主导了 ERP 效应，而视觉奖励价值本身则没有产生影响，这可能是由于其干扰了目标处理。这些结果激发了一个两阶段模型，其中首先在特定于每个感觉模态的局部优先级图上增强高奖励刺激的显著性，然后在第二阶段，奖励价值和自上而下的注意力机制在感觉模态之间进行整合以影响感知。
