The influence of task-relevance and awareness on reward-driven attentional capture [Talk]

During search for shape-singleton targets that stand out by their shape among more shape-homogenous distractors, distractors carrying a color associated with reward can capture visual attention, seemingly despite being task-irrelevant and not salient, indicating that reward-driven capture could be different from top-down and bottom-up attentional guidance. However, if association with reward increases a color’s salience – as sometimes assumed –, a rewarded color would stand out as a singleton compared to surrounding stimuli with colors not or less associated with reward. Consequently, distractors carrying a rewarded color could match an observer’s attentional control setting during search for (shape) singleton targets. To test this possibility, we used the classical design for investigating reward-driven capture, with a learning block for the acquisition of color-reward associations. However, besides a singleton-search task, we added a feature-search task as an additional transfer block. While we found reward-driven capture during singleton search (replicating previous results), there was no evidence for reward-driven capture during feature search. Additionally, we registered participants’ awareness of the reward-color association. Unexpectedly, we found that even during singleton search, reward-driven capture was restricted to participants who did not notice the reward-color association, suggesting that reward-driven attentional capture depends not only on task-relevance but also on unawareness of the now irrelevant reward-color association. We conclude that the influence of reward on attentional guidance is more complex than previously thought, with interactions of task relevance and awareness that warrant further research.

Aug. 28, 2022 — Sep. 1, 2022

44th European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP)

In-Person

Nijmegen, the Netherlands