Value-Driven Attentional Capture

In recent years,researchers have found that an inconspicuous stimulus which associated with value information(reward or punishment)can involuntarily capture attention,even if the valuerelated stimulus is a non-target,and this phenomenon is named as value-driven attentional capture.Currently,most studies on value-driven attentional capture focus on spatial attention.However,spatial attention is only one aspect of attention.The results from Le Pelley's(2017)study demonstrated that distractors were associated with a value outcome can acquire high attentional priority on temporal selection,but it remains unclear whether effects of reward and punishment on temporal selection are driven by the motivational significance of value information,or by the valence of the outcome.In this study,we attempt to explore the effect of value-related distractors on attention selection from the perspective of temporal dimension.The present study used RSVP paradigm to explore the value-driven attentional capture in non-space,and through the gain or loss of money to set up a reward or punishment situation separately.Experiment 1 examined attention capture of reward-related distractors on temporal selection,and Experiment 2 examined attention capture of punishment-related distractors on temporal selection.The purpose of these two experiments was to investigate whether temporal selection is influenced by learning about the relationship of distractors with reward,or with punishment,or both.Considering that individual reward sensitivity is related to cognitive development,Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1,and participants of different ages were selected to further investigate the development characteristics and laws of reward-driven attentional capture on temporal selection.Our results showed that in Experiment 1,compared with the neutral distractors,the accuracy of target recognition in reward-related distractors was not significantly reduced,and there was no significantly difference in the accuracy of target recognition at the short distractor-target separation(180ms).It showed that reward-related distractors did not have priority in time selection.In Experiment 2,in punishment-related distractors,when the interval between critical distractors and target was 180 ms,the accuracy of target recognition was lower than that in neutral distractors.This indicated that punishment-related distractors could give priority to the attention in the time selection.In Experiment 3,when the critical distractors were connected with reward,the junior high school group showed reward-driven attentional capture,while the senior high school group showed no reward-driven attentional capture.The present findings demonstrated that(1)in the temporal dimension,value-driven attentional capture was related to the valence of value information.When the distractors and punishment established a connection,value-based attentional capture can be triggered,and the duration of punishment-driven attentional capture was very short;(2)in the temporal dimension,reward-driven attentional capture tended to weaken with age,and the transition from junior high school to senior high school was the key period of reward-driven attention capture to change.