Information-driven attentional capture

Abstract

Visual attention, the selective prioritization of sensory information, is crucial in dynamic, information-rich environments. That both internal goals and external salience modulate the allocation of attention is well established. However, recent empirical work has found instances of experience-driven attention, wherein task-irrelevant, physically non-salient stimuli reflexively capture attention in ways that are contingent on an observer’s unique history. The prototypical example of experience-driven attention relies on a history of reward associations, with evidence attributing the phenomenon to reward-prediction errors. However, a mechanistic account, differing from the reward-prediction error hypothesis, is needed to explain how, in the absence of monetary reward, a history of target-seeking leads to attentional capture. Here we propose that what drives attentional capture in such cases is not target-seeking, but an association with instrumental information. To test this hypothesis, we used pre-cues to render the information provided by a search target either instrumental or redundant. We found that task-irrelevant, physically non-salient distractors associated with instrumental information were more likely to draw eye movements (a sensitive metric of information sampling) than were distractors associated with redundant information. Furthermore, saccading to an instrumental-information-associated distractor led to a greater behavioral cost: response times were slowed more severely. Crucially, the distractors had equivalent histories as sought targets, so any attentional differences between them must be due to different information histories resulting from our experimental manipulation. These findings provide strong evidence for the information history hypothesis and offer a method for exploring the neural signature of information-driven attentional capture.