The precision of attention selection during reward learning influences the mechanisms of value-driven attention.

ABSTRACT: Reward-predictive items capture attention even when task-irrelevant. While value-driven attention typically generalizes to stimuli sharing critical reward-associated features (e.g., red), recent evidence suggests an alternative generalization mechanism based on feature relationships (e.g., redder). Here, we investigated whether relational coding of reward-associated features operates across different learning contexts by manipulating search mode and target-distractor similarity. Results showed that singleton search training induced value-driven relational attention regardless of target-distractor similarity (Experiments 1a-1b). In contrast, feature search training produced value-driven relational attention only when targets and distractors were dissimilar, but not when they were similar (E

SUBMITTER: Jia O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12311181 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature