Thus, here we aimed to examine the involvement of early visual cortex in supporting attentional control guided by the learned value associated with task-irrelevant distractors. Although previous work has shown that the value of task-relevant visual information increases neural activity in areas of early visual cortex, it is unclear how the learned value of irrelevant distractors modulates cortical responses in these cortical regions. Importantly, these behavioral effects of value-based attentional capture are underexpressed and overexpressed in patients with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and addiction, respectively. In the laboratory, the value associated with an irrelevant distractor interferes with the processing of task-relevant visual information, resulting in increased response times (RTs) and sometimes reduced accuracy in a variety of tasks ranging from simple visual discrimination to more complex scenarios in which the value of multiple competing items must be compared. Likewise, distractors that are distinguished only by their value, not their visual salience, also capture visual attention-even on occasions when high-valued distractors are unactionable and irrelevant to current behavioral goals (e.g., seeing a piece of cake on another table, but your waiter tells you it is no longer available). In most real-world situations, stimuli that are visually salient-such as a camera flash in a theater or a green object in a sea of red-automatically capture attention. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.įunctional magnetic resonance imaging IEM, McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award to JTS ( ), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute International student fellowship to SI ( ), a Royal Thai Scholarship from the Ministry of Science and Technology Thailand to SI ( ), NSF GRFP to VAV ( ), and NEI F32-EY028438 to TCS ( ). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All data files and analysis scripts are available from the OSF database: įunding: This study was supported by NEI R01-EY025872 to JTS ( ), a James S. Received: FebruAccepted: JPublished: August 9, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Itthipuripat et al. PLoS Biol 17(8):Īcademic Editor: Frank Tong, Vanderbilt University, UNITED STATES This finding suggests that value-driven attentional capture begins with sensory modulations of distractor representations in early areas of visual cortex.Ĭitation: Itthipuripat S, Vo VA, Sprague TC, Serences JT (2019) Value-driven attentional capture enhances distractor representations in early visual cortex. We found that the fidelity of neural representations related to task-irrelevant distractors increased when the distractors were previously associated with a high reward. Here, we measured functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in human visual cortex while subjects performed a value-based learning task, and we applied a multivariate inverted encoding model (IEM) to assess the fidelity of distractor representations in early visual cortex. Although increasing the value of task-relevant stimuli systematically up-regulates neural responses in early visual cortex to facilitate information processing, it is not clear whether the value of task-irrelevant distractors influences behavior via competition in early visual cortex or via competition at later stages of decision-making and response selection. Conversely, task-irrelevant stimuli that were previously associated with a high reward can capture attention and distract processing away from relevant stimuli (e.g., seeing a chocolate bar in the pantry when you are looking for a nice, healthy apple). When a behaviorally relevant stimulus has been previously associated with reward, behavioral responses are faster and more accurate compared to equally relevant but less valuable stimuli.
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