Reward-Modulating Effect On Stimulus-Driven Attention

Selective attention is one of the most important cognitive activities and an important window to carry out various psychological processes,which has been one of the most important research over the recent decades.Researchers have conducted a series of studies on the processes of attention capture and attention engagement.Presently many researchers believe that two control mechanisms of selective attention have been existed,namely stimulus-driven attention and goal-driven attention,the former mainly reflects bottom-up processing mode,while the latter reflects top-down processing mode.Zivony(2018)proposed that stimulus-driven attention and goal-driven attention have two different results in essence,only the latter could engage more attention.However,selective attention could be affected by reward feedback,which has been explained by Chelazzi that reward feedback could strengthen stimulus'physical characteristics and motivation level or explained by Anderson that reward feedback enhance the connection between stimulus and reward.This study begins to focus on whether the probability of reward feedback has a reward-modulating effect on the processes of stimulus-driven attention,to make up for the difference of attention engagement between stimulus-driven attention and goal-driven attention,and aims to explore whether it would promote more attention input of stimulus-driven attentionBy adopting Gaspelin's spatial-cuing paradigm,this study aims to test reward-modulating effect on the processes of stimulus-driven attention by adding two different reward feedback to stimulus-driven attention.Three experiments are conducted:In experiment 1,it aims to test reward-modulating effect on the processes of stimulus-driven attention when reward feedback is certain.In experiment 2,we randomly change the feedback of high and low rewards to investigate whether reward feedback could still regulate the processes of stimulus-driven attention when the reward feedback is uncertain.To improve the design of experiment 2,experiment 3 compares the different performance of high and low reward learning by controlling the partly random feedback of high and low rewards,to further explore whether the reward feedback could still regulate stimulus-driven attention.The conclusions are as follows:(1)It indeed exists a separation between goal-driven attention and stimulus-driven.(2)Explicit reward feedback has an important modulatory effect on stimulus-driven attention.(3)The regulating effect of reward feedback is characterized by"all or nothing".This study shows that explicit reward feedback has a certain reward-modulating effect on stimulus-driven attention,which can be further processed by"assigning physical characteristics of the stimulus.This study not only helps to reveal the external mechanism of reward feedback,but also provides important theoretical guidance and reference value for the development of marketing,industrial design and other applied disciplines.