Speaker
Description
Beyond Top-down and Bottom-up attention, growing evidence has highlighted that neutral stimuli could earn attentional priority when paired with stimuli – appetitive or aversive – that are highly relevant to the individual. This phenomenon, called Value-Driven Attentional Capture (VDAC), has been attested across a wide range of procedures. However, little is known about how broadly this attentional priority is generalizable to similar stimuli. To this aim, we carried out a study using a new three-step paradigm: (1) through a matching-to-sample procedure, associations between pairs of abstract stimuli were established (2) one member of each pair was paired with a (high or low) monetary reward in a visual search task (3) the other member of each pair (the one that was never directly paired with a reward) was used as a distractor in another visual search task. We hypothesised people would be slower in finding the target in this latter task when the stimulus paired with the high-rewarded one (compared to the stimulus paired with the low-rewarded one) was presented as a distractor. These results would suggest that attentional prioritization could generalize to other related stimuli and may provide a useful model to investigate the failures of cognitive control in clinical syndromes wherein the value assigned to stimuli conflicts with behavioural goals (e.g., addiction).
| If you're submitting a poster, would you be interested in giving a blitz talk? | Yes |
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