The effect of reward history on top-down attentional control: Facilitating or interfering?

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2020, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (3) : 557-563.

PDF(665 KB)
PDF(665 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2020, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (3) : 557-563.

The effect of reward history on top-down attentional control: Facilitating or interfering?

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Abstract

Attentional control is directly affected by rewards. There is no consensus on how the history of reward affects attentional control. When stimuli are associated with reward, their visual features will acquire high attentional priority to that stimulus possessing those features can involuntarily the capture attention. However, studies have shown that rewarding history can promote later performance. This study intends to use the point detection paradigm to explore the effect of previous reward histories on top-down attentional control. Did previous reward histories promote top-down control or interfere with top-down attentional control? Two experiments were conducted in this study. Experiment 1 explored the influence of reward history on top-down attentional control through whether there were rewards in the two stages of manipulation. Experiment 2 used the same experimental method as experiment 1 to change the reward conditions and further explore the stability of reward history in promoting top-down attentional control. The amount of reward in the reward -- no-reward group was changed from 100 yuan to 500 yuan, to further explore the stability of the results of experiment 1 and the mode in which the reward effect worked. It also examined whether increasing the reward amount in the second stage would continue to improve performance after the reward had been given in the first stage. The results of experiment 1 showed that there was no significant difference in the two-stage reaction time between the reward- no-reward groups. In no-reward - reward group, there was a significant difference between the two stages, and the overall response of the reward phase was significantly shorter than that of the non-reward phase. There is an increased incentive to reward history for current tasks. In experiment 2, there was no difference between the two stages of reaction time in the high-reward -no-reward group. There was a significant difference in the overall response between the low-reward - high-reward groups. The overall reaction time was significantly shorter in the high-reward phase than in the low-reward phase. The results are consistent with experiment 1, which further proves that reward history promotes top-down attentional control. The present findings demonstrate that: In the top-down attentional control, the attention-behavior model in the case of reward incentive will continue to the later stage, which will promote the later task and show the continuous enhancement effect on the top-down attentional control.

Key words

reward / reward history / top-down attentionalcontrol / target template / attentional capture

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The effect of reward history on top-down attentional control: Facilitating or interfering?[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2020, 43(3): 557-563
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