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Mean reaction time and accuracy per distractor type condition. (a) Participants responded slower on high compared to low reward-value distractor trials and slower on both high and low reward-value distractor trials compared to no distractor trials. (b) Participants responded equally accurate on high and low reward-value distractor trials and better on no distractor trials compared to both high and low reward-value distractor trials.
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It has been shown that pure Pavlovian associative reward learning can elicit value-driven attentional capture. However, in previous studies, task-irrelevant and response-independent reward-signalling stimuli hardly competed for visual selective attention. Here we put Pavlovian reward learning to the test by manipulating the extent to which bottom-u...
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Citations
... Thus, one could argue that the VMAC task does not entail "pure" sign-tracking. 73 While we chose to use a well-established VMAC task, future studies could better tap pure sign-tracking by using a paradigm in which reward-paired stimuli are both task-irrelevant and responseindependent. 73,76 Conclusion To conclude, current findings propose that reward-related aberrant attentional functioning may be related to OC symptoms, findings that need to be further elaborated to clinically diagnosed patients with OCD. From a therapeutic standpoint, this may suggest to acknowledge reward functioning, in addition to the traditional anxiety-avoidance aspect of OCD, as part of the psychoeducation phase in current OCD treatments, thereby expanding the patient's understanding of his condition. ...
Introduction:
Cognitive models of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) implicate heightened attention allocation to stimuli related to one's obsessions in the disorder. Recently, to overcome several limitations of reaction time-based measures, eye-tracking methodology has been increasingly used in attentional research.
Methods:
A meta-analysis of studies examining attention allocation towards OCD-related vs. neutral stimuli, using eye-tracking methodology and a group-comparison design, was conducted conforming to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Separate meta-analyses were performed for attentional vigilance (both latency and location of first fixations) and maintenance (total dwell time and total fixation count, conjointly). Each meta-analysis was conducted twice - once including all studies (main analysis) and once only including studies using the free-viewing paradigm (secondary analysis).
Results:
The systematic search yielded a total of nine studies. Of those, eight provided the needed data to be included in the meta-analysis. No evidence emerged for vigilance via latency to first fixation. Vigilance reflected via first fixation location emerged in the main analysis, but not in the secondary one. Evidence for attentional maintenance was found only when analyzing free-viewing studies exclusively (the secondary analysis).
Limitations:
To increase the accuracy of the research question, correlational studies were excluded, resulting in a small number of available studies.
Conclusions:
OCD may be characterized by vigilance, but mainly in tasks entailing specific demands and/or goals. Conversely, attentional maintenance may be evident only when using tasks that pose no requirements or demands for participants.
... Although during the test phase reward associated cues are not reinforced anymore, it has consistently been shown that they can still involuntarily capture participants' attention, a phenomenon called value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) (Anderson et al., 2011), and thereby influence perceptual judgments across a variety of tasks (Anderson et al., 2011;Yantis et al., 2012;Camara et al., 2013;Failing and Theeuwes, 2015;Bucker and Theeuwes, 2017;Tankelevitch et al., 2020). The typical finding of these studies is that when PR stimuli are the same as the target of a task they facilitate performance (accuracy or RT) but importantly when they are irrelevant to the task or assigned to distractors, they can impair performance (Anderson et al., 2014;Asutay and Västfjäll, 2016;Gong et al., 2017;Bucker and Theeuwes, 2018;Qin et al., 2020;Watson et al., 2020), a so-called value-driven distraction (Rusz et al., 2020). Such effects likely arise as a result of the enhanced representation of distractors in visual cortex (Itthipuripat et al., 2019), which limit the processing resources that are available to the target. ...
Perception is modulated by reward value, an effect elicited not only by stimuli that are predictive of performance-contingent delivery of reward (PC) but also by stimuli that were previously rewarded (PR). PC and PR cues may engage different mechanisms relying on goal-driven versus stimulus-driven prioritization of high value stimuli, respectively. However, these two modes of reward modulation have not been systematically compared against each other. This study employed a behavioral paradigm where participants’ visual orientation discrimination was tested in the presence of task-irrelevant visual or auditory reward cues. In the first phase (PC), correct performance led to a high or low monetary reward dependent on the identity of visual or auditory cues. In the subsequent phase (PR), visual or auditory cues were not followed by reward delivery anymore. We hypothesized that PC cues have a stronger modulatory effect on visual discrimination and pupil responses compared to PR cues. We found an overall larger task-evoked pupil dilation in PC compared to PR phase. Whereas PC and PR cues both increased the accuracy of visual discrimination, value-driven acceleration of reaction times (RTs) and pupillary responses only occurred for PC cues. The modulation of pupil size by high reward PC cues was strongly correlated with the modulation of a combined measure of speed and accuracy. These results indicate that although value-driven modulation of perception can occur even when reward delivery is halted, stronger goal-driven control elicited by PC reward cues additionally results in a more efficient balance between accuracy and speed of perceptual choices.
... Thus, one could argue that the VMAC task does not entail "pure" sign-tracking. 73 While we chose to use a well-established VMAC task, future studies could better tap pure sign-tracking by using a paradigm in which reward-paired stimuli are both task-irrelevant and responseindependent. 73,76 Conclusion To conclude, current findings propose that reward-related aberrant attentional functioning may be related to OC symptoms, findings that need to be further elaborated to clinically diagnosed patients with OCD. From a therapeutic standpoint, this may suggest to acknowledge reward functioning, in addition to the traditional anxiety-avoidance aspect of OCD, as part of the psychoeducation phase in current OCD treatments, thereby expanding the patient's understanding of his condition. ...
Objective. Recently, a novel approach to obsessive-compulsive disorder has emerged, implicating altered reward functioning in the disorder. Yet, no study to date has directly examined the attentional aspect of reward functioning in participants with obsessive-compulsive symptoms, with past research mostly relying on reaction-time-based tasks.
Methods. A reward-based value modulated attentional capture task was completed by a sample of non-clinical student participants – 44 with high (HOC) and 48 with low (LOC) levels of obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms. We measured the extent to which high and low reward-signaling distractors captured attention and impaired performance on the task, resulting in a lower possibility of obtaining a monetary reward. Attentional capture was indexed via fixation data, and further explored using saccade data.
Results. Both groups performed more poorly when a high-reward signaling distractor was present, compared to when a low-reward signaling distractor was present. Importantly, this difference was significantly greater in the HOC group, and was found to be driven by the specific effects of reward-signaling distractors. Similar results emerged when exploring saccade data, and remained significant after controlling for both addiction-related compulsivity and depressive symptoms.
Conclusions. Current findings suggest that attentional reward-related functioning may be associated with obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Different aspects of reward functioning, including attention, should be further explored and incorporated in future research and clinical endeavors.
... The modulation of synaptic plasticity in these devices follows the learning principles of the human brain. Associative learning is a learning principle in which ideas and experiences reinforce one another, which is critical to individuals during the extraction of the world logical structure for quick adaptation to the environment [11][12][13][14]. Classical associative learning is described by the Pavlovian dog, which starts to salivate to the ringing of a bell after a training process of feeding (unconditioned stimulus) and ringing a bell (neutral stimulus). ...
Associative learning is a critical learning principle uniting discrete ideas and percepts to improve individuals’ adaptability. However, enabling high tunability of the association processes as in biological counterparts and thus integration of multiple signals from the environment, ideally in a single device, is challenging. Here, we fabricate an organic ferroelectric neuromem capable of monadically implementing optically modulated associative learning. This approach couples the photogating effect at the interface with ferroelectric polarization switching, enabling highly tunable optical modulation of charge carriers. Our device acts as a smarter Pavlovian dog exhibiting adjustable associative learning with the training cycles tuned from thirteen to two. In particular, we obtain a large output difference (>10 ³ ), which is very similar to the all-or-nothing biological sensory/motor neuron spiking with decrementless conduction. As proof-of-concept demonstrations, photoferroelectric coupling-based applications in cryptography and logic gates are achieved in a single device, indicating compatibility with biological and digital data processing.
... A test phase, based on the additional singleton paradigm (Theeuwes, 1992), showed that high-value reward cues distracted more than the low-value reward cues. In a more recent study Bucker and Theeuwes (2018) replicated their findings with a conditioning phase in which the reward cue was not salient, because it appeared in competition with another equally salient stimulus. Indeed, if a reward cue is the most salient item in the display, a problem could arise because it could draw attention even if it carries no instrumental relation with reward, and the reinforcement of such attentional orienting could transfer in the visual search test phase. ...
A great wealth of studies has investigated the capacity of motivationally relevant stimuli to bias attention, suggesting that reward predicting cues are prioritized even when reward is no longer delivered and when attending to such stimuli is detrimental to reward achievement. Despite multiple procedures have been adopted to unveil the mechanisms whereby reward cues gain attentional salience, some open questions remain. Indeed, mechanisms different from motivation can be responsible for the capture of attention triggered by the reward cue. In addition, we note that at present only a few studies have sought to address whether the cue attractiveness dynamically follows changes in the associated reward value. Investigating how and to what extent the salience of the reward cue is updated when motivation changes, could help shedding light on how reward‐cues attain and maintain their capacity to attract attention, and therefore on apparent irrational attentive behaviors.
... Previous studies investigating the feature-reward effect (e.g., the attentional biases induced by the color-reward association) have demonstrated that the effect could occur regardless of any awareness of the association (e.g., Anderson, 2015;Bucker & Theeuwes, 2018;Le Pelley et al., 2015). However, under certain conditions, awareness could play an important role in forming feature-reward associations. ...
Many studies have reported attentional biases based on feature–reward associations. However, the effects of location–reward associations on attentional selection remain less well-understood. Unlike feature cases, a previous study that induced participants’ awareness of the location–reward association by instructing them to look for a high-reward location has suggested the critical role of goal-driven manipulations in such associations. In this study, we investigated whether the reward effect occurred without goal-driven manipulations if participants were spontaneously aware of the location–reward association. We conducted three experiments using a visual search task that included four circles where participants received rewards; one possible target location was associated with a high reward, and another with a low reward. In Experiment 1, the target was presented among distractors, and participants had to search for the target. The results showed a faster reaction time in the high-reward rather than the low-reward locations only in participants aware of the location–reward association, even if they were not required to look for the association. Moreover, in Experiment 2, we replicated the main findings of Experiment 1, even when the target had an abrupt visual onset to restrict goal-driven manipulations. Furthermore, Experiment 3 confirmed that the effect observed in Experiment 2 could not be attributed to the initial eye position. These findings suggest that goal-driven manipulations are unnecessary for inducing reward biases to high-reward locations. We concluded that awareness of the association rather than goal-driven manipulations is crucial for the location–reward effect.
... Although the literature survey found sufficient empirical evidence showing a positive effect by the social comparison information on energy conservation, it is hard to find a study dealing with the importance of salience of the information, because salience of information is the field of cognitive psychology. Cognitive research focuses on salience of information as a factor of the stimulus-driven perception effect to compare other factors of the goal-driven perception effect, which is not the primary research scope of this paper, even though a number of cognitive studies have been well documented [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Furthermore, it was observed that the Korean statement not only provided too much content but also carried the neighbor comparison information, which was not as salient as the HERs by OPOWER (see Appendix). ...
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether salience of neighbor comparison information attracts more attention from residents and consequently leads to significant energy conservation. An eye-tracking experiment on 54 residents in a local apartment complex in Korea found that the average time of attention to the neighbor comparison information increased to 277 ms when the size of the information was four times larger and the information was located to the far left. However, the interviews with the subjects suggest that salience of the information is seemingly unrelated to energy conservation, because most of them did not agree with the social consensus that individuals need to refrain from consuming energy when they know that they have consumed more than the neighbor’s average. Utility data on 502 households in the apartments revealed that, of the households notified that they consumed more than their neighbors, only less than 50% reduced their energy consumption, which supports the interview results. Therefore, it was concluded that neighbor comparison information did not lead to significant energy conservation effects in the community, although salience of the information contributed to attracting more attention to the information. Unavailable household data remained as limitation to clarify the effect by households.
... Our findings about the reward-driven attention on visual processing are consistent with previous studies using other tasks and paradigms (Anderson, 2013;Bucker & Theeuwes, 2018;Chelazzi et al., 2013;Failing & Theeuwes, 2018;Theeuwes, 2019). For example, Anderson and his colleagues have found that after reward association, the nonsalient stimulus would capture attention and slow down the visual search of a salient target (Anderson, 2015;Anderson, 2017;Anderson & Halpern, 2017;Anderson et al., 2011;Anderson et al., 2014). ...
Many studies have revealed that reward-associated features capture attention. Neurophysiological evidence further suggests that this reward-driven attention effect modulates visual processes by enhancing low-level visual salience. However, no behavioral study to date has directly examined whether reward-driven attention changes how people see. Combining the two-phase paradigm with a psychophysical method, the current study found that compared with nonsalient cues associated with lower reward, the nonsalient cues associated with higher reward captured more attention, and increased the perceived contrast of the subsequent stimuli. This is the first direct behavioral evidence of the effect of reward-driven attention on low-level visual perception.
... Evidence that reward history can constitute a separate class of priority signal in attentional selection, above and beyond top-down and bottom-up processes, comes from various experimental designs (e.g., Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011;Anderson & Halpern, 2017;Bourgeois, Neveu, Bayle, & Vuilleumier, 2015;Bucker & Theeuwes, 2016, 2017a, 2017bFailing, Nissens, Pearson, Le Pelley, & Theeuwes, 2015;Le Pelley, Pearson, Griffiths, & Beesley, 2015;Munneke, Hoppenbrouwers, & Theeuwes, 2015;Munneke, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2016;Pearson, Donkin, Tran, Most, & Le Pelley, 2015;Roper, Vecera, & Vaidya, 2014). Typically, those studies involve a visual search task of a target singleton (e.g., a diamond) among irrelevant shapes (e.g., circles). ...
The reward history of a stimulus can yield strong attentional selection biases. Indeed, attentional capture can be triggered by previously rewarded items which are neither salient nor relevant for the ongoing task, even when selection is clearly counter-productive to actually obtain the reward outcome. Therefore, value-driven atten-tional capture (VDAC) has been argued to be an automatic attention mechanism. Our study aimed at putting the VDAC automaticity directly to the test. For this purpose, the Load Theory offers a comprehensive framework where distraction is observed under low but not high perceptual load condition. Nevertheless, if VDAC is indeed automatic, distraction by reward-stimuli should be observed on both perceptual load conditions. We used a feature vs. conjunction discrimination of a go/no-go cue to manipulate perceptual load. As expected, our results revealed that perceptual load decreased interference produced by low-reward distractor. However, this effect was not significant for high-reward distractor, giving support to VDAC automaticity. We discussed our results in light of the Load Theory literature and we strongly encourage to consider reward history along with perceptual load in determining attentional capture.
... even in the following non-reward phase(Anderson et al., 2011;Theeuwes and Belopolsky, 2012; 611 Yantis et al.,Chelazzi et al., 2013;Hickey and van Zoest, 2013;Bucker and Theeuwes, 2018; 612 Mine and Saiki, 2018). The impact of associative value during the non-reward phase depends on 613 whether the previously rewarded stimuli serve as targets or distractors. ...
Reward value guides goal-directed behavior and modulates early sensory processing. Rewarding stimuli are often multisensory but it is not known how reward value is combined across sensory modalities. Here we show that the integration of reward value critically depends on whether the distinct sensory inputs are perceived to emanate from the same multisensory object. We systematically manipulated the congruency in monetary reward values and the relative spatial positions of co-occurring auditory and visual stimuli that served as bimodal distractors during an oculomotor task performed by healthy human participants (male and female). The amount of interference induced by the distractors was used as an indicator of their perceptual salience. Our results across two experiments show that when reward value is linked to each modality separately, the value congruence between vision and audition determines the combined salience of the bimodal distractors. However, reward value of vision wins over the value of audition if the two modalities are perceived to convey conflicting information regarding the spatial position of the bimodal distractors. These results show that in a task that highly relies on the processing of visual spatial information, the reward values from multiple sensory modalities are integrated with each other, each with their respective weights. This weighting depends on the strength of prior beliefs regarding a common source for incoming uni-sensory signals based on their congruency in reward value and perceived spatial alignment.
