To look or not to look? Reward, selection history, and oculomotor guidance

Eye Movements as a Window into Decision-Making

For over 100 years, eye movements have been studied and used as indicators of human sensory and cognitive functions. This review evaluates how eye movements contribute to our understanding of the processes that underlie decision-making. Eye movement metrics signify the visual and task contexts in which information is accumulated and weighed. They indicate the efficiency with which we evaluate the instructions for decision tasks, the timing and duration of decision formation, the expected reward associated with a decision, the accuracy of the decision outcome, and our ability to predict and feel confident about a decision. Because of their continuous nature, eye movements provide an exciting opportunity to probe decision processes noninvasively in real time. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Vision Science, Volume 8 is September 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Reward-driven attention alters perceived salience

Many studies have revealed that reward-associated features capture attention. Neurophysiological evidence further suggests that this reward-driven attention effect modulates visual processes by enhancing low-level visual salience. However, no behavioral study to date has directly examined whether reward-driven attention changes how people see. Combining the two-phase paradigm with a psychophysical method, the current study found that compared with nonsalient cues associated with lower reward, the nonsalient cues associated with higher reward captured more attention, and increased the perceived contrast of the subsequent stimuli. This is the first direct behavioral evidence of the effect of reward-driven attention on low-level visual perception.

Beyond Looking for the Rewarded Target: The Effects of Reward on Attention in Search Tasks

One puzzling result in training-test paradigms is that effects of reward-associated stimuli on attention are often seen in test but not in training. We focus on one study, where reward-related performance benefits occur in the training and which was discussed contentiously. By using a similar design, we conceptually replicated the results. Moreover, we investigated the underlying mechanisms and processes resulting in these reward-related performance benefits. In two experiments, using search tasks and having participants perform the tasks either with or without individually adjusted time pressure, we disentangled the mechanisms and processes contributing to the reward-related benefits. We found evidence that not only search efficiency is increased with increasing reward, but also that non-search factors contribute to the results. By also investigating response time distributions, we were able to show that reward-related performance effects increased as search time increased in demanding tasks but not in less demanding tasks. Theoretical implications of the results regarding how reward influences attentional processing are discussed.

A Multimodal Analysis Combining Behavioral Experiments and Survey-Based Methods to Assess the Cognitive Effect of Video Game Playing: Good or Evil?

This study aims to bridge the gap between the discrepant views of existing studies in different modalities on the cognitive effect of video game play. To this end, we conducted a set of tests with different modalities within each participant: (1) Self-Reports Analyses (SRA) consisting of five popular self-report surveys, and (2) a standard Behavioral Experiment (BE) using pro- and antisaccade paradigms, and analyzed how their results vary between Video Game Player (VGP) and Non-Video Game Player (NVGP) participant groups. Our result showed that (1) VGP scored significantly lower in Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) than NVGP (p = 0.023), and (2) VGP showed significantly higher antisaccade error rate than NVGP (p = 0.005), suggesting that results of both SRA and BE support the existing view that video game play has a maleficent impact on the cognition by increasing impulsivity. However, the following correlation analysis on the results across individual participants found no significant correlation between SRA and BE, indicating a complex nature of the cognitive effect of video game play.