Reward-Priming of Location in Visual Search

Hickey, Clayton; Chelazzi, Leonardo; Theeuwes, Jan · 2014 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0103372

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Summary

This study investigates whether reward history influences the spatial deployment of attention during visual search, extending previous findings that reward primarily primes feature-based selection. While existing research demonstrates that reward facilitates processing of rewarded features and inhibits irrelevant ones, its impact on location priming remained largely unexplored. The authors hypothesized that reward acts as a non-strategic guide for visual search by priming the contextual locations of stimuli, creating facilitatory biases for target locations and inhibitory biases for distractor locations. To test this, the researchers analyzed data from 95 participants across four experiments using a compound visual search task. Participants maintained fixation while identifying a shape singleton target and ignoring a color singleton distractor. Crucially, the task decoupled the target-defining feature from the response feature, allowing isolation of perceptual effects from motor responses. After each correct trial, participants received randomly determined monetary rewards (1 or 10 points). The experimental design manipulated whether the target or distractor appeared at the same location as in the preceding trial and whether the preceding trial yielded high or low reward. This approach allowed the authors to examine the interaction between prior reward magnitude and location repetition on reaction times. The results revealed a significant three-way interaction between relevant object, prior location, and prior reward. High-magnitude reward in a preceding trial facilitated subsequent attention return to the target location, resulting in faster reaction times when the target reappeared there. Conversely, high reward exacerbated the cost of attending to the location previously occupied by the distractor, indicating stronger inhibition of that spatial position. These effects were spatially specific; analyzing adjacent locations rather than exact repetitions eliminated the reward interaction, confirming that reward priming is circumscribed to specific coordinates. Furthermore, exploratory analysis showed that reward-priming of location operates independently of reward-priming of color, as the latter effect persisted even when location priming was controlled. The findings demonstrate that reward history directly guides the spatial deployment of attention, independent of strategic goals or feature-based associations. This suggests that reward creates enduring biases in the visual system that facilitate attention to rewarded locations and suppress attention to locations associated with irrelevant stimuli. By showing that reward impacts location priming similarly to feature priming, the study expands the understanding of how motivational factors shape perceptual processing, highlighting that reward influences not just what features are attended, but where attention is directed in space.

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• visual search