Abstract
Stimuli formerly associated with monetary reward capture our attention, even if this attraction is contrary to current goals (so-called value-driven attentional capture [VDAC], see Anderson (Ann N Y Acad Sci 1369:24–39, 2016), for a review). Despite the growing literature to this topic, little is known about the boundary conditions for the occurrence of VDAC. In three experiments, we investigated the role of response conflicts and spatial uncertainty regarding the target location during the training and test phase for the emergence of value-driven effects. Thus, we varied the occurrence of a response conflict, search components, and the type of task in both phases. In the training, value-driven effects were rather observed if the location of the value-associated target was not predictable and a response conflict was present. Value-driven effects also only occurred, if participants have not learned to deal with a response conflict, yet. However, the introduction of a response conflict during learning of the color-value association seemed to prevent attention to be distracted by this feature in a subsequent test. The study provides new insights not only into the boundary conditions of the learning of value associations, but also into the learning of cognitive control.
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Availability of data and materials
The datasets are available in a public repository. This repository can be found here: https://osf.io/wkqm2/.
Code availability
Experiment code and code for data analyses in R are available on request. Requests should be addressed to Annabelle Walle (walle.annabelle@gmail.com) or Ronald Hübner (ronald.huebner@uni-konstanz.de).
Notes
Note that from a theoretical perspective, a value effect should also be found in this kind of task (see, e.g., Sha & Jiang, 2016). Nevertheless, often no such effect is observed (e.g., Anderson et al., 2011b; Kim & Beck, 2020; Roper et al., 2014). One reason could be a ceiling effect. Alternatively, participants could use other features than the value color to find the target (Walle & Druey, 2021).
Initially, we recruited 24 participants. However, we did not establish a uniform payment for those participants, meaning they could choose to receive either the full amount of money earned, or course credit in exchange for 10 € of the amount earned, plus the remaining entitlement. Due to discussion and suggestions in literature relating to the appropriate payment in tasks of this type (Anderson & Halpern, 2017), we excluded the 17 participants with the “hybrid” payment and replaced them with new participants.
They also found a difference between high and low in the incongruent condition, but much less pronounced than in the congruent one. Since the authors did not report this comparison, it is unclear, whether it is significant.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Miriam Kachelmann, Mara Schmidt, and Li-Ching Chuang for the data acquisition.
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This research was funded by a grant (FOR 1882) from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to author Ronald Hübner.
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AW performed literature review, interpretation of results and data analysis; AW and MDD performed idea generation; AW and MDD performed formulating hypotheses; AW, MDD, and RH contributed to design of behavioral experiments; AW, MDD, and RH prepared draft manuscript; AW, MDD, and RH prepared final manuscript.
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Walle, A., Druey, M.D. & Hübner, R. Learned cognitive control counteracts value-driven attentional capture. Psychological Research 87, 2048–2067 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01792-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01792-1