| dc.description.abstract | In order to examine the scope of reward history effects on attention, I conducted four experiments and am planning on conducting two more. Reward history effects on attention (i.e., value-driven attentional capture; VDAC) are a persisting source of attentional bias that can overcome cognitive control and contribute to maladaptive biases in patients with substance use disorder. Before VDAC can contribute to clinical interventions, however, we as a field need more understanding of its effects in more ecologically valid conditions. In chapter two, I found that reward history extends to oculomotor behavior that biases the direction of eye movements in both unguided and guided search. In chapter three, I found that the neural correlates of value-driven spatial orienting include the conventional value-driven attentional network and regions that have been linked to value-driven feature-based orienting, but also regions that have been implicated in the processing of scene, space, and object information. In my fourth chapter, I found that reward history effects for multi-feature objects are limited to the reward-associated features and do not imbue non-predictive features with elevated priority. My last experiment chapter employed a reversal learning paradigm to demonstrate a temporal disconnect between reward learning and the acquisition of reward history effects on attention, as there was a notable delay before participants updated their biases towards the most currently reward-associated feature. The results inform us about the extent of reward history effects on attention that extend beyond traditional visual search paradigms and provide insight into the challenges of overcoming maladaptive attention. | |
