Rewards modulate saccade latency but not exogenous spatial attention.

Stephen Dunne,Amanda Ellison,Daniel T Smith

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01080

Stephen Dunne, Amanda Ellison + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01080

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Abstract

The eye movement system is sensitive to reward. However, whilst the eye movement system is extremely flexible, the extent to which changes to oculomotor behavior induced by reward paradigms persist beyond the training period or transfer to other oculomotor tasks is unclear. To address these issues we examined the effects of presenting feedback that represented small monetary rewards to spatial locations on the latency of saccadic eye movements, the time-course of learning and extinction of the effects of rewarding saccades on exogenous spatial attention and oculomotor inhibition of return. Reward feedback produced a relative facilitation of saccadic latency in a stimulus driven saccade task which persisted for three blocks of extinction trials. However, this hemifield-specific effect failed to transfer to peripheral cueing tasks. We conclude that rewarding specific spatial locations is unlikely to induce long-term, systemic changes to the human oculomotor or attention systems.

Highlights

The relationship between reward and behavior has become a central theme in psychology (Balleine and Dickinson, 1998), with an increasing number of studies focusing on the link between reward and eye movements
We examined the effect of rewarding saccades on exogenous spatial attention and inhibition of return (IOR), which refers to a bias against orienting to previously attended locations (Posner and Cohen, 1984)
The facilitation emerged after only one block of rewarded trials and the magnitude of the facilitatory effect was consistent across the conditioning phase

Summary

Introduction

The relationship between reward and behavior has become a central theme in psychology (Balleine and Dickinson, 1998), with an increasing number of studies focusing on the link between reward and eye movements This association between reward and eye movements has been widely investigated, predominantly in primates using food rewards (e.g., Kawagoe et al, 1998; Takikawa et al, 2002; Bendiksby and Platt, 2006; Yamamoto et al, 2013). These studies show that saccades to rewarded locations are initiated earlier, have faster peak velocities and are more accurate relative to saccades to unrewarded locations. Markowitz et al (2011) investigated the time-course of integration of value information with the visual properties of a scene and reported that short-latency saccades (

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