Contributions Of Reward Association To Attention Shifting And Disengagement

Visual selective attention screens a large amount of information from the outside world in order to make rational use of the limited cognitive resources of human beings.This selection process depends on spatial attention.And the spatial attention can be divided into three major steps: disengagement of attention from the current attentional focus(attentional disengagement),shift of the attentional focus toward a new location or object(attentional shift),and engagement of the attentional focus to the new location or object(attentional engagement).previous studies have shown that reward can capture attention,but they mainly focused on whether reward has an effect on attention or how it affects selective attention.Few researches have studied whether rewards have different effects on different components of the spatial attention.However,in these few studies,all of them are focused on the engagement and disengagement components of the spatial attention,and all of them use well-known visual search paradigms,such as additional singleton paradigm,spatial cueing paradigm and dot-probe task.These studies not only have different results,but also have known disadvantages in their paradigms.Therefore,our study uses a paradigm,a variation of the GAP paradigm,which has not been used in this field to separate attentional shift and disengagement,in order to explore the effect of reward on attentional shift and disengagement.In experiment 1 we explored the effect of reward on attentional shift by controlling whether the color of the target in the prosaccade task was consistent with the color which associated with reward during the training phase.The results showed that the reward history could promote the shift of attention(the response time when the target was high-reward color was significantly faster than that of low-reward/no-reward/novelty color)even after the participants were no longer rewarded at the testing phase.Experiment 2 explored the effect of reward on attentional disengagement by controlling whether the color of the fixation marker in the prosaccade task was consistent with thecolor which associated with reward during the training phase.The results showed that even after the participants were no longer rewarded at the testing phase,the reward acquired at the training phase could still inhabit the disengagement of attention during the testing phase(the response time when the fixation marker was high-reward color was significantly slower than that of low-reward/no-reward/novel color).In summary,the neutral stimulus previously associated with reward can affect the selective attention even when the neutral stimulus is no longer rewarded,and can either facilitate the attentional shift or inhabit the attentional disengagement.