Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Learned But Not Distracting: Low-Value Stimuli And Value-Driven Attentional Capture, John Albanese

Senior Theses and Projects

Stimuli previously associated with reward slow response times (RTs) when presented as irrelevant distractors in subsequent, unrewarded tasks (value driven attentional capture, VDAC). Typical VDAC training requires search for one of two experimentally-determined, colored circles and an orientation judgement of a line inside the color-defined target. Reward follows correct responses, associating high- or low-value with specific colors. Distractors rendered in high-value colors consistently slow RTs in an unrewarded test phase, an outcome that is rarely observed for low-value colors. Might this be due to a failure to adequately learn the reward contingencies during training? 22 observers underwent a modified training …