How does reward compete with goal-directed and stimulus-driven shifts of attention?

ABSTRACT

In order to behave adaptively, attention can be directed in space either voluntarily (i.e. endogenously) according to strategic goals, or involuntarily (i.e. exogenously) through reflexive capture by salient or novel events. The emotional or motivational values of stimuli can also influence attentional orienting. However, little is known about how reward-related effects compete or interact with endogenous and exogenous attention mechanisms. Here we designed a visual search paradigm in which goal-driven and stimulus-driven shifts of attention were manipulated by classic spatial cueing procedures, while an irrelevant, but previously rewarded stimulus also appeared as a distractor and hence competed with both types of spatial attention during search. Our results demonstrated that stimuli previously associated with a high monetary reward received higher attentional priority in the subsequent visual search task, even though these stimuli and reward were no longer task-relevant, mitigating the attentional orienting induced by both endogenous and exogenous cues.

KEYWORDS:

• Attentional orienting
• goal-directed
• stimulus-driven
• reward
• visual search

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Annabelle Roth and Virginie Haldemann for help with data acquisition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the Fondation Fyssen (AB); the Marie-Curie CoFund BRIDGE program (AB) from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 267171; the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) for the Affective Sciences financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF No 51NF40-104897) and hosted by the University of Geneva; and an award from the Geneva Academic Society (Foremane Fund to PV).