Learning to avoid looking: Competing influences of reward on overt attentional selection

Pairing a stimulus with large reward increases the likelihood that it will capture attention and eye-gaze, even when such capture has negative consequences. This suggests that a stimulus’s signalling relationship with reward (the co-occurrence of that stimulus and reward) has a powerful influence on attentional selection. In the present study, we demonstrate that a stimulus’s response relationship with reward (the reward-related consequences of attending to that stimulus) can also exert an independent, competing influence on selection. Participants completed a visual search task in which they made a saccade to a target shape to earn reward. The colour of a distractor signalled the magnitude of reward available on each trial. For one group of participants, there was a negative response relationship between making a saccade to the distractor and reward delivery: looking at the distractor caused the reward to be cancelled. For a second group, there was no negative response relationship, but an equivalent distractor–reward signalling relationship was maintained via a yoking procedure. Participants from both groups were more likely to have their gaze captured by the distractor that signalled high reward versus low reward, demonstrating an influence of the signalling relationship on attention. However, participants who experienced a negative response relationship showed a reduced influence of signal value on capture, and specifically less capture by the high-reward distractor. These findings demonstrate that reward can have a multifaceted influence on attentional selection through different, learned stimulus-reward relationships, and thus that the relationship between reward and attention is more complex than previously thought.