2014/11/24 by Mike E. Le Pelley, Daniel Pearson, Oren Griffiths +1 · 337 citations
Decision Sciences · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Behavioral Health and Interventions #Cognitive psychology #Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics #Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies #Psychology #Social psychology
paper · open access · doi:10.1037/xge0000037
published in Journal of Experimental Psychology General 144(1), 158-171 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 2014/11/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Attention provides the gateway to cognition, by selecting certain stimuli for further analysis. Recent research demonstrates that whether a stimulus captures attention is not determined solely by its physical properties, but is malleable, being influenced by our previous experience of rewards obtained by attending to that stimulus. Here we show that this influence of reward learning on attention extends to task-irrelevant stimuli. In a visual search task, certain stimuli signaled the magnitude of available reward, but reward delivery was not contingent on responding to those stimuli. Indeed, any attentional capture by these critical distractor stimuli led to a reduction in the reward obtained. Nevertheless, distractors signaling large reward produced greater attentional and oculomotor capture than those signaling small reward. This counterproductive capture by task-irrelevant stimuli is important because it demonstrates how external reward structures can produce patterns of behavior that conflict with task demands, and similar processes may underlie problematic behavior directed toward real-world rewards.