The effect of reward on orienting and reorienting in exogenous cuing

Bucker, Berno; Theeuwes, Jan · 2014 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/s13415-014-0278-7

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Summary

This study investigates how reward-induced motivation influences exogenous attentional orienting and the subsequent inhibition of return (IOR). While reward is known to affect top-down cognitive control and perceptual processes, it remains unclear whether it modulates automatic, stimulus-driven attentional capture. The authors aimed to determine if reward affects initial orienting, reorienting, and the interaction between motivational states and cognitive control mechanisms. The experiment utilized a variant of the exogenous cuing paradigm with 35 participants. Attention was captured by nonpredictive peripheral onset cues, ensuring that orienting was purely stimulus-driven rather than strategic. Participants performed a target discrimination task at short (170 ms) and long (960 ms) cue–target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Reward motivation was manipulated in alternating blocks of low (€0.10) and high (€1.00) potential monetary gain, contingent on performance thresholds. The study also examined transient effects by analyzing posterror slowing and correlated behavioral changes with the BAS-Drive personality scale, which measures trait propensity for reward-driven behavior. Results indicated that initial attentional orienting, measured at short SOAs, showed typical cue facilitation effects in both low- and high-reward conditions, with no significant difference between them. This suggests that initial exogenous capture is automatic and unaffected by motivational state. However, at long SOAs, the classic IOR effect—slower responses to targets at previously cued locations—was observed only in the high-reward condition. In the low-reward condition, no IOR effect was found. Additionally, high-reward conditions induced greater posterror slowing, indicating enhanced top-down cognitive control following errors. Finally, individual differences in the BAS-Drive scale were correlated with reward-triggered changes in reorienting and cognitive control, but not with automatic orienting. The findings demonstrate that reward-induced motivation selectively influences reorienting and inhibitory processes, which involve top-down control, but does not affect initial exogenous orienting, which remains data-driven. The study concludes that while reward enhances overall behavioral performance and recruits cognitive control mechanisms to improve efficiency, it does not alter the automatic capture of attention. This distinction clarifies the boundary between bottom-up attentional processes and top-down motivational influences, suggesting that reward primarily modulates executive functions rather than the initial sensory-driven allocation of attention.

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• executive function