Fear of Missing Out and attentional capture by distractor associated with social reward

International audienceOn the one hand, stimuli paired with social reward can capture attention even when their processing is irrelevant to,or even detrimental for the task at hand. On the otherhand, individual differences exist in how we respond to social reward, and the role of the individual’s Fear of MissingOut (FoMO) in getting involved in social reward seeking behaviors has recently been the subject of particular interest.The current study investigated whether FoMO could predict attentional capture by socially rewarded distractors.Participants performed a visual search task on ecologicaldriving pictures in which stimuli previously associated withsocial reward (neutral or smiling faces) appeared as distractors on a smartphone screen. Individual FoMO scorespositively predicted attentional capture by high-rewardstimuli, but only under situations favorable to distraction(foggy scenes). Individual and contextual factors thereforeseem to interact to determine whether or not distractionby socially rewarded stimuli will occur