Abstract
Every day, we are confronted with a vast amount of information that all competes for our attention. Some of this information might be associated with rewards (e.g., gambling) or losses (e.g., insurances). To what extent such information, even if irrelevant for our current task, not only attracts attention but also affects our actions is still a topic under examination. To address this issue, we applied a new experimental paradigm that combines visual search and a spatial compatibility task. Although colored stimuli did not modulate the spatial compatibility effect more than gray stimuli, we found clear evidence that reward and loss associations attenuated this effect, presumably by affecting attention and response selection. Moreover, there are hints that differences in these associations are also reflected in a modulation of the spatial compatibility effect. We discuss theoretical implications of our results with respect to the influences of color, reward, and loss association on selective attention and response selection.
Highlights
Many tasks of working people nowadays take place on the Internet
We focus on how value associations modulate attentional guidance and subsequent response selection
The aim of Experiment 1 was to examine the effects of value associations on attention and subsequent response selection
Summary
Many tasks of working people nowadays take place on the Internet. task-irrelevant, there is a constant flow of advertising, which sometimes promises rewards (the purchase of a gadget we always wanted) or plays with our fears (insurances). To perform a task efficiently, we have to select task-relevant information from the environment, while ignoring irrelevant information (Allport, 1989; Hübner et al, 2010), and respond correspondingly This raises the question: Which stimulus attracts our attention to what extent? The consensus has been that stimuli exclusively attract attention due to their specific low-level features (i.e., perceptual salience), or their consistency with the observer’s objective(s) (Theeuwes et al, 2010). This assumption has recently been challenged by reports of stimuli attracting attention due to their selection or reward history (cf Awh et al, 2012). This means a stimulus may attract attention either because participants reacted to it in the past (e.g., Sha and Jiang, 2016) or because a reaction to it was previously paired with monetary reward or loss (e.g., Wang et al, 2013; for reviews, see Chelazzi et al, 2013; Anderson, 2016, 2019; Bourgeois et al, 2016; Failing and Theeuwes, 2018; Watson et al, 2019)
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