Attentional Orienting by Non-informative Cue Is Shaped via Reinforcement Learning.

Sang A Cho,Yang Seok Cho

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02884

Abstract

It has been demonstrated that a reward-associated stimulus feature captures attention involuntarily. The present study tested whether spatial attentional orienting is biased via reinforcement learning. Participants were to identify a target stimulus presented in one of two placeholders, preceded by a non-informative arrow cue at the center of the display. Importantly, reward was available when the target occurred at a location cued by a reward cue, defined as a specific color (experiments 1 and 3) or a color–direction combination (experiment 2). The attentional bias of the reward cue was significantly increased as trials progressed, resulting in a greater cue-validity effect for the reward cue than the no-reward cue. This attentional bias was still evident even when controlling for the possibility that the incentive salience of the reward cue color modulates the cue-validity effect (experiment 2) or when the reward was withdrawn after reinforcement learning (experiment 3). However, it disappeared when the reward was provided regardless of cue validity (experiment 4), implying that the reinforcement contingency between reward and attentional orienting is a critical determinant of reinforcement learning-based spatial attentional modulation. Our findings highlight that a spatial attentional bias is shaped by value via reinforcement learning.

Highlights

Our cognition selects only a small amount of information from various sensory inputs in the environment at any given moment because of limits in our cognitive capability
They hypothesized that if reward reinforces the spatial attentional orienting toward the target stimulus in an instrumental manner, the target would be selected primarily, but a distractor signaling high reward would be more ignored than a distractor signaling low reward, resulting in a less interference effect for the distractor associated with high reward than one associated with low or no reward. They found significantly greater interference with the high-reward distractor than with the low-reward distractor, consistent with the findings of other studies with a similar method (Bucker et al, 2015; Pearson et al, 2015; Munneke et al, 2016). These results suggest that the value-driven attentional bias was obtained depending on the Pavlovian association between reward and stimulus feature rather than the reinforcement of spatial attentional orienting toward the target
Trials were excluded from analyses if response time (RT) were shorter than 150 ms or longer than three standard deviations above the participants’ mean (2.06%), and only correct trials were included in RT analyses

Summary

Introduction

Our cognition selects only a small amount of information from various sensory inputs in the environment at any given moment because of limits in our cognitive capability. Our attention is allocated to a specific object, location, or feature to choose information for further processing. Visual attentional allocation is accomplished in two modes of attentional orienting. The other mode of attentional orienting is based on bottom–up factors, such as the physical salience of stimuli (spatial or temporal discontinuity), which is referred to as exogenous attentional orienting (Posner, 1980). The exogenous mode of orienting is known to induce an involuntary capture based on stimulus features. Theories of an exogenous attentional-orienting mechanism have established what determinant is critical for the priority of involuntary attentional processing. The contingent attentional capture account suggests that attention is allocated to a stimulus containing the target-defining feature for the task at hand (e.g., Folk et al, 1992). The salience-driven attention theory insists that attentional deployment depends on the physical salience of stimuli (e.g., Theeuwes, 1992)

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