The Role Of Reward History And Working Memory In Guiding Visual Attention

Visual selective attention is one of many properties of human vision, which allows them to extract important information from abundant visual inputs. In order to complete the present task successfully, we selected the information associated with the task and rejected the information irrelevant with the task in the attention process. Traditionally, the models of attentional control assert a dichotomy between top-down(goal-directed) and bottom-up(stimulus-driven) control. However, this theoretical dichotomy fails to explain all the attentional phenomenon. Many studies proposed a new attentional guidance source,which was based on one's experience, involving selection history and reward history. At the same time, in recent years, investigators have found that the content of working memory could modulate the process of attention in the way of the top-down control. This study focuses on the role of reward history and working memory in the guidance of attention.Recent studies have suggested that pre-established reward association yields strong impact on the deployment of visual attention. Though the reward is a new kind of attentional guidance source, relationship between reward history and working memory in guiding visual attention is still a controversial issue. The current study sought to investigate the simultaneous involvement of reward history and working-memory in attentional guidance during visual search task. This study composed of four experiments and each experiment was conducted in two phases: training and testing. We established the association between specific target and reward during a visual search training session,and a two(reward, nonreward) by two(valid, invalid) within-subject design was employed during test phase. To explore the role of reward history and working memory in guiding visual attention. Experiment 1 used two items in the display and found significant effects of both working-memory and reward history, although working-memory dominated reward history when they cued different items. Experiment 2 increased items to four and replicated the results of Experiment 1. Experimental procedure was modified to eliminate the contribution of voluntary refreshing of working-memory in Experiment 3and acquired the similar results; although working-memory keep dominant. In Experiment4, we enhanced the strength of reward history, and the results still held. Effects of reward history and working memory never interacted in four experiments. These results suggest that reward history and working memory are separate sources of attentional guidance and have little impact on each other. And working-memory dominated reward history when they cued different items.