Fengyuan Liu¹, Tzu-Yao Chiu¹, Andrew B. Leber¹, Julie D. Golomb¹; ¹The Ohio State University

Attention capture episodes represent dynamic attentional states during which irrelevant feature information can interfere with and distort the perception of visual search targets. Are such distortions automatic, or can individuals exert control over the extent of the distortions? We approach this question by using performance-contingent reward to manipulate the degree to which individuals are motivated to accurately perform a continuous feature report task. Participants were presented with an array of four colored squares for 50 ms and asked to report the color of a target square marked by a thick white border. On two-thirds of the trials, a pre-cue (four white dots surrounding one placeholder) was presented 150 ms before the color array. When the pre-cue was present, it could highlight either the upcoming target location (valid condition) or a non-target location (invalid condition). At the end of the trial, continuous report color wheels were presented in each of the four display locations, and participants were asked to report both target location and color by clicking on the wheel at the target location. Critically, we manipulated motivation by varying the amount of monetary reward between blocks in two levels: a low-reward baseline and a high-reward (motivation boost) condition with increased incentives for accurate responses and penalties for inaccurate responses. Probabilistic mixture modeling analysis showed that both attention cues and reward modulated feature perception. Notably, on invalid-cue trials, probability of reporting the target color was increased with higher reward. Interestingly, we also observed more feature-binding errors in the higher reward condition, where participants accurately localized the target but swapped the invalidly cued color. These results suggest a potential trade-off between the orienting of spatial attention and updating of the location’s bound feature. When sufficiently motivated, individuals may be able to reduce distractor-evoked spatial distractions at the cost of unbound feature perception.

Acknowledgements: NIH R01-EY025648 (JG)