A Study On The Effects Of Reward And Loss And Social Feedback On Attention Capture

Selective attention,as a vital cognitive activity in people's daily life,has received extensive attention from the cognitive psychology community in recent decades.Researchers have carried out a series of studies on selective attention.In recent years,they have discovered an attention selection mechanism that is different from traditional stimulus-driven and target-driven: value-driven attentional capture,which refers to a stimulus in the value training phase establishes a connection with the reward,and when it appears as a distraction in the subsequent visual search task,it can automatically capture attention.Similarly,it is found in daily life that many people's behaviors are not directly driven by external rewards,but by the social feedback generated by these behaviors.This study discusses the effects of rewards and losses and social feedback on attention capture,and aims to explore whether there is a difference between the capture effect of rewards on attention and the capture effect of loss on attention,and whether different social feedbacks have different effects on attention capture.This study is based on the two-stage training-testing paradigm of Anderson(2011b)and conducted two experiments.In Experiment 1,through the money feedback method,the stimulus of the three color characteristics was connected with the target object and the high and low value rewards and losses respectively,and appeared as distractions in the subsequent testing phase to discuss the effect of rewards and losses.Note the difference in impact captured.In Experiment 2,the emotional face feedback method was used to connect the stimuli with three color characteristics to the three emotional social feedbacks respectively,and appear as distractions in the subsequent testing stage to explore the attention of faces with different emotional valences.At the same time,combined with previous studies,the influence of gender and race on attention capture is also included in the scope of analysis.This research has the following conclusions:(1)The stimuli associated with high and low rewards and losses have significant differences in attention capture.High rewards and losses cause higher attention capture than low-value rewards.(2)Compared with positive and neutral social feedback,negative social feedback can capture attention to a greater extent.(3)Faces of different races are more likely to attract attention capture than faces of the same race;faces of opposite sex can attract attention capture of male individuals more.Therefore,this study proves that both rewards and social feedback have an impact on attention capture,and further validates the independent mechanism theory of attention capture,which has guiding significance for the intervention of individuals with abnormal behaviors and the enhancement of their ability to adapt to the environment.