Effects Of Reward History And Physical Salience On Attention Capture During Goal-directed

It has been shown that physical salience and reward can jointly regulate attentional selection,and both can facilitate goal-directed activities when they are congruent with task goals.However,when both are inconsistent with the task goal,the moderating effects of goal-directed processes on both and their mechanisms need to be further explored.On the one hand,although research has generally demonstrated that stimulus-driven attentional capture can be suppressed by cognitive control,it is controversial whether value-driven attentional capture can also be moderated by goal-directed processes.On the other hand,most previous studies have examined the mechanisms by which goal-directed processes modulate value-driven and stimulus-driven processes separately,and few studies have directly compared and analyzed the differences between the two regulation mechanisms.The present study used an endogenous cue paradigm,combined with behavioral methods and eye-movement techniques,to investigate 1)whether goal-directed processes can modulate value-driven and stimulus-driven attentional capture,and 2)how goal-directed processes differ in their modulation of the two types of attentional capture.Study 1 was a behavioral study(Experiment 1)that used the reward association learning and spatial cue paradigms to examine whether stimulus-driven and value-driven attentional capture could be moderated by goal-directed processes.The value-color association was established through an associative learning task.The color was presented as a feature of the singleton distractor in a subsequent search task.No reward was given for correct responses in the search task,regardless of the color of the singleton distractor.The results showed that both high physical salience and high-value distractors captured attention when the cue was invalid,whereas the capture effect disappeared when the cue was valid.Study 2 was an eye-movement study(Experiments 2 and 3)that examined the mechanisms by which goal-directed processes modulate value-driven and stimulus-driven attention capture and their differences.The manipulation of distractor salience and value in single cases was essentially the same as in Experiment 1.Experiments 2 and 3 endogenous cues cued the exact location and hemifield of target would appear,respectively.The results of both experiments found that behavioral metrics(reaction time and accuracy)and eye-movement metrics(probability of first saccade to target,first saccade latency,and speed)were not affected by either the degree of singleton distractor’s salience or singleton distractor’s value.The following conclusions were obtained from this study:(1)goal-directed processes can regulate both stimulus-driven and value-driven attentional capture;and(2)goal-directed processes can inhibit both stimulus-driven and value-driven attentional capture in a relatively consistent manner.