How do magnitude and frequency of monetary reward guide visual search?

• Published in: Attention, perception & psychophysics Vol. 78; no. 5; pp. 1221 - 1231
• Main Authors: Won, Bo-Yeong, Leber, Andrew B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.07.2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Attention - physiology; Behavior; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Cognitive Psychology; Decision making; Evidence; Expected values; Experiments; Female; Humans; Incentives; Information sources; Male; Psychology; Reward; Space Perception - physiology; Studies; Visual Perception - physiology; Visual task performance; Young Adult; Visual search; Statistical learning; Reward learning; Spatial attention; Spatial probability cueing
• ISSN: 1943-3921; 1943-393X
• DOI: 10.3758/s13414-016-1154-z

How does reward guide spatial attention during visual search? In the present study, we examine whether and how two types of reward information—magnitude and frequency—guide search behavior. Observers were asked to find a target among distractors in a search display to earn points. We manipulated multiple levels of value across the search display quadrants in two ways: For reward magnitude, targets appeared equally often in each quadrant, and the value of each quadrant was determined by the average points earned per target; for reward frequency, we varied how often the target appeared in each quadrant but held the average points earned per target constant across the quadrants. In Experiment 1 , we found that observers were highly sensitive to the reward frequency information, and prioritized their search accordingly, whereas we did not find much prioritization based on magnitude information. In Experiment 2 , we found that magnitude information for a nonspatial feature (color) could bias search performance, showing that the relative insensitivity to magnitude information during visual search is not generalized across all types of information. In Experiment 3 , we replicated the negligible use of spatial magnitude information even when we used limited-exposure displays to incentivize the expression of learning. In Experiment 4 , we found participants used the spatial magnitude information during a modified choice task—but again not during search. Taken together, these findings suggest that the visual search apparatus does not equally exploit all potential sources of spatial value information; instead, it favors spatial reward frequency information over spatial reward magnitude information.