Cognitive control and counterproductive oculomotor capture by reward-related stimuli

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the extent to which value-modulated oculomotor capture is subject to top-down control. In these experiments, participants were never required to look at the reward-related stimuli; indeed, doing so was directly counterproductive because it caused omission of the reward that would otherwise have been obtained. In Experiment 1, participants were explicitly informed of this omission contingency. Nevertheless, they still showed counterproductive oculomotor capture by reward-related stimuli, suggesting that this effect is relatively immune to cognitive control. Experiment 2 more directly tested whether this capture is controllable by comparing the performance of participants who either had or had not been explicitly informed of the omission contingency. There was no evidence that value-modulated oculomotor capture differed between the two conditions, providing further evidence that this effect proceeds independently of cognitive control. Taken together, the results of the present research provide strong evidence for the automaticity and cognitive impenetrability of value-modulated attentional capture.

Keywords:

• Visual attention
• Reward learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Eye movements
• Attentional capture

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT100100260].

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT100100260].

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ Allowing for omissions on distractor-absent trials is useful, because it permits a valid test of the influence of stimulus salience on oculomotor capture, by comparing the rate of omissions on trials featuring a salient distractor with the rate on distractor-absent trials. This comparison controls for causes of omission trials that are not related to distractor salience (e.g., inaccuracy in the recording of gaze location, random eye movements by the participant, etc.), since these will be equal on trials with a salient distractor and distractor-absent trials.

² There were no such problems with the tracking of any participant in Experiment 1, where the lowest overall percentage of successfully tracked samples was 83%; for this participant, only 8.1% of trials were excluded as a consequence of not having at least 25% of tracked samples.

³ In fact, the two accounts offered here as to why omissions do not occur on every distractor-present trial (stochasticity of attentional capture and saccade programming, and top-down inhibition of attentional capture) are not mutually exclusive. It is quite possible that both contribute.