Daniel Pearson¹ (), Kirralee Harris¹; ¹The University of Sydney

Pairing a stimulus with reward produces a rapid, automatic attentional bias towards that stimulus that persists even when counterproductive – a phenomenon known as value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC). Beyond influencing performance in visual search tasks, individual differences in VMAC have been shown to predict real-world behaviour, particularly reward-related behaviour related to addiction and compulsivity. However, the mechanism that links VMAC and behaviour remains unclear. Evidence from the decision-making literature suggests that individuals are more likely to choose options that receive more attention during decision-making, though this work has focused primarily on goal-directed attention. The present experiments test whether automatic, reward-related attentional biases similarly influence value-based choices. Across two experiments, participants completed a visual search task where different coloured distractors predicted either high or low-value rewards. Then, they made choices between similarly-rated snack foods randomly paired with either the high- or low-value colour. Experiment 1 used a blocked design, which revealed a small choice bias towards the snack food paired with the high-value colour, but this bias did not persist when excluding participants who believed that the search and choice task were related. Experiment 2 used an intermixed design to reduce the influence of task context, and demonstrated a robust choice bias for snacks paired with the high-value colour, which persisted when excluding participants who believed that there was a relationship between the tasks. Moreover, individual differences in the magnitude of the VMAC effect predicted the magnitude of the choice bias, such that those who were more susceptible to having their attention captured by stimuli associated with high-value rewards were also more likely to choose options that were paired with those stimuli. These findings suggest that reward-related attentional biases can influence value-based decision-making, providing a potential mechanism for the link between VMAC and real-world behaviour.