Failure to exploit learned spatial value information during visual search

ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been rapid proliferation of studies demonstrating how reward learning guides visual search. However, most of these studies have focused on feature-based reward, and there has been scant evidence supporting the learning of space-based reward. We raise the possibility that the visual search apparatus is impenetrable to spatial value contingencies, even when such contingencies are learned and represented online in a separate knowledge domain. In three experiments, we interleaved a visual choice task with a visual search task in which one display quadrant produced greater monetary rewards than the remaining quadrants. We found that participants consistently exploited this spatial value contingency during the choice task but not during the search task – even when these tasks were interleaved within the same trials and when rewards were contingent on response speed. These results suggest that the expression of spatial value information is task specific and that the visual search apparatus could be impenetrable to spatial reward information. Such findings are consistent with an evolutionary framework in which the search apparatus has little to gain from spatial value information in most real world situations.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual search
• choice
• reward learning
• spatial value

Acknowledgment

Support was provided by NSF BCS-1632296 to A. B. L. We thank Rayan Magsi, Beau Snoad, Rebecca Freeman, and Eleni Christofides for help with data collection for their assistance in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We do acknowledge, however, that estimates of effect size and power from previous data are prone to inflation, due to a “winner’s curse,” in which researchers are biased to primarily follow up on positive results (Halsey, Curran-Everett, Vowler, & Drummond, 2015). Therefore, our true power may have been less than 0.9.

2 The Bayes factors are written as BF₁₀ when the evidence is in favor of H1 and as BF₀₁ when the evidence is in favor of H0. We computed the BF using JASP 0.8.1.2 (JASP Team, 2017), with the default prior width of 0.707.

3 We thank the anonymous reviewer for this example.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences [grant number BCS-1632296].