The Dynamic Interplay Between Attention and Reward

Over the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in exploring how attention and reward value can interact with one another during cognition and behavior. This interdisciplinary work has already provided many critical findings that have revolutionized what have traditionally been isolated fields of study. However, there are still many unexplored aspects by which attention and value can interact with one another. Here I advance upon this interdisciplinary work by investigating several aspects of the dynamic interplay between attention and value. In the first three studies I look at how reward can influence attention and assess its neural impact using EEG. I first detail the neural mechanisms underlying reward-driven salience, a phenomenon that describes how reward-associated items receive higher priority during attentional orienting. These findings provide evidence that value-driven salience generates a unique increase in the strength of attentional orienting. In the second study I investigate whether associating distractors with rewards can lead to larger impairments in sustained spatial attention. Results indicate that sustained spatial attention can be resistant to a distractor’s reward-history, highlighting an important boundary condition for reward-related distraction. The objective of the third study was to investigate the neural processes underlying reward expectation and outcome processing, with a focus on how these reward expectations influence attention and attentional orienting. A core finding from this experiment is that outcome valence modulates the strength of attentional orienting, while uncertain outcomes lead to elongated attentional processing. In the fourth and final study I turn to investigating how attention can influence decision making. A burgeoning body of work has shown that attention can be highly predictive of choice, but it has not yet determined how inattention can influence decision processes. To this end I investigated if and how attentional distractors influence nutritional decision making using a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures. The results indicate that distractors can interrupt the decision process but that they do not reset it. Collectively, these studies demonstrate the diverse ways in which attention and reward can interact with one another, and how studying these interactions can help us better understand a number of real-world behaviors and circumstances.