Abstract
The vital role of reward in guiding visual attention has been supported by previous literatures. Here, we examined the motivational impact of monetary reward feedback stimuli on visual attention selection using an event-related potential (ERP) component called stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) and a standard contextual cueing (CC) paradigm. It has been proposed that SPN reflects affective and motivational processing. We focused on whether incidentally learned context knowledge could be affected by reward. Both behavior and brain data demonstrated that contexts followed by reward feedback not only gave rise to faster implicit learning but also obtained a larger CC effect.
Highlights
Our eyes receive a myriad of perceptual inputs at any given moment
We focus on an event-related potential (ERP) component named stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN), which has been proved to be sensitive to the feedback or outcome of one’s task performance in previous experiments
Subsequent simple effects test demonstrated that the SPN amplitude was larger for repeated configuration than novel configuration when there was the reward feedback, p < 0.001, whereas no such significant contextual difference was found in the Non-reward condition, p = 0.50
Summary
Our eyes receive a myriad of perceptual inputs at any given moment. Our visual system, is severely limited in processing this information (Simons and Rensink, 2005). Configuration of a trial was defined by the spatial layout formed by all the items on that trial, and there were two types of configurations: in one type of configuration, the locations of distractors remained constant across blocks, i.e., the repeated configurations; while in the other type, distractors’ locations varied across blocks, i.e., the novel configurations They found faster search times in repeated configurations than in novel ones. CC emerges quickly, after about 5 to 10 repetitions; and participants’ performance approaches asymptote after being exposed approximately 30 times to repeated displays In both repeated and novel configurations, the location of the target remained constant, and the eccentricity of the target location was balanced across configurations
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