Value-driven attentional capture in the auditory domain.
It is now well established that the visual attention system is shaped by reward learning. When visual features are associated with a reward outcome, they acquire high priority and can automatically capture visual attention. To date, evidence for value-driven attentional capture has been limited entirely to the visual system. In the present study, I demonstrate that previously reward-associated sounds also capture attention, interfering more strongly with the performance of a visual task. This finding suggests that value-driven attention reflects a broad principle of information processing that can be extended to other sensory modalities and that value-driven attention can bias cross-modal stimulus competition.
Brian A
BA
Anderson
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D012201:Reward