Mapping Reward Values to Cues, Locations, and Objects: The Influence of Reward Associations on Visual Attention

Previous work has attempted to fit reward-driven attentional selection as being exogenous (stimulus-driven) or endogenous (goal-driven). However, recent work suggests that reward’s effects on attention depend on the type of stimulus feature that the motivational information is imparted during learning (incentive salience). If true, then reward should not be limited to solely impacting early perceptual or late categorization processes attention. The current study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to test the idea that reward’s effects on attention depend on the process that the reward information is embedded – early perceptual or late categorization. Results demonstrated reward-driven effects on perceptual representation when value information was conveyed by cues in a spatial cuing task, but did not find any value-driven effects when value was introduced later in processing in target-defined features in a target detection task. The current work suggests that reward can be rapidly acquired and sustained throughout a task, recruiting mechanisms of both exogenous and endogenous attention