Value-driven attentional and oculomotor capture during goal-directed, unconstrained viewing
Open accessAbstract
Covert shifts of attention precede and direct overt eye movements to stimuli that are task relevant or physically salient. A growing body of evidence suggests that the learned value of perceptual stimuli strongly influences their attentional priority. For example, previously rewarded but otherwise irrelevant and inconspicuous stimuli capture covert attention involuntarily. It is unknown, however, whether stimuli also draw eye movements involuntarily as a consequence of their reward history. Here, we show that previously rewarded but currently task-irrelevant stimuli capture both attention and the eyes. Value-driven oculomotor capture was observed during unconstrained viewing, when neither eye movements nor fixations were required, and was strongly related to individual differences in visual working memory capacity. The appearance of a reward-associated stimulus came to evoke pupil dilation over the course of training, which provides physiological evidence that the stimuli that elicit value-driven capture come to serve as reward-predictive cues. These findings reveal a close coupling of value-driven attentional capture and eye movements that has broad implications for theories of attention and reward learning.
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Reward-based selection history created during a separate training session influences overt search, with high-reward objects invoking more oculomotor capture.
“Target objects associated with relatively high reward during a training session invoke more oculomotor capture compared to objects previously associated with low reward when presented as a task-irrelevant distractor in a subsequent test session.”
From Selection history: How reward modulates selectivity of visual attention. (2018) · cites this paper as Anderson & Yantis, 2012
Experiment 1’s test-phase results report greater oculomotor impairment with high-value distractors, while low-value distractors produced an intermediate effect. The General discussion says the high–low difference was small and not statistically significant, so the unqualified claim of greater capture overstates the evidence. (LLM, conf=0.88)
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Selection history: How reward modulates selectivity of visual attention.
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- Authors
- Anderson, B. A., & Yantis, S.
- Affiliations
- Johns Hopkins University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Anderson, Brian A.
- ORCID
- Anderson, Brian A.
- Venue
- Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
- Published
- 2012-07-19
- Volume
- 74
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 1644-1653
- ISSN
- 1943-3921 (ISSN-L)
- 1943-393X
- PMC
- PMC3499680
- OpenAlex
- W2064396321
- Cited by
- 192
- References
- 46
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 16 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 18 · 2015: 20 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 4
- FWCI
- 8.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Attention Perception & Psychophysics (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA013165, F31DA033754)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Keywords
- attentional capture, oculomotor capture, reward value, reward learning, covert attention, eye movements, visual working memory capacity, individual differences, pupil dilation, reward-predictive cues
- MeSH terms
- Attention, Cues, Drive, Eye Movements, Goals, Humans, Learning, Memory, Memory, Short-Term, Pupil, Reaction Time, Reward
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