Overt attentional capture by reward-related stimuli overcomes inhibitory suppression

Salient-but-irrelevant distractors can automatically capture attention and eye-gaze in visualsearch. However, recent findings have suggested that attention to salient-but-irrelevant stimulican be suppressed when observers use a specific target template to guide their search (i.e.,feature search). A separate line of research has indicated that attentional selection isinfluenced by factors other than the physical salience of a stimulus and the observer’s goals.For instance, pairing a stimulus with reward has been shown to increase the extent to which itcaptures attention and gaze (as though it has become more physically salient), even when suchcapture has negative consequences for the observer. Here we used eye-tracking with arewarded visual search task to investigate whether capture by reward can be suppressed in thesame way as capture by physical salience. When participants were encouraged to use featuresearch, attention to a distractor paired with relatively small reward was suppressed. However,under the same conditions attention was captured by a distractor paired with large reward,even when such capture resulted in reward omission. These findings suggest thatreward-related stimuli are given special priority within the visual attention system over andabove physically-salient stimuli, and have implications for our understanding of real-worldbiases to reward-related stimuli, such as those seen in addiction.