Interaction between value and perceptual salience in value-driven attentional capture

Abstract

Previous research demonstrated that associating a stimulus with value (e.g., monetary reward) can increase its salience and induce a value-driven attentional capture when it becomes a distractor in visual search. Here we investigate to what extent this value-driven attentional capture is affected by the perceptual salience of the stimulus and the type of value attached to the stimulus. We showed that a color previously associated with monetary gain or loss impaired subsequent search for a unique shape target (Experiment 1), but a shape that was previously associated with gain or loss did not affect search for a unique color target (Experiments 2A and 2B), indicating that the associative learning of value and the effect of value-driven attentional capture are modulated by the perceptual salience of a stimulus. The value-based attentional capture recurred when the shape distractor was paired more strongly with monetary loss (Experiment 2C) or was paired with pain stimulation (Experiment 3), indicating that when the value is significant enough to an organism, it can render a perceptually less salient stimulus capable of capturing attention in visual search. These results suggest that value interacts with perceptual salience to modulate the value-based attentional capture, and the extent of value information capturing attention depends on the biological significance of the value attribute.