Learned reward association improves visual working memory.

Abstract

Statistical regularities in the natural environment play a central role in adaptive behavior. Among other regularities, reward association is potentially the most prominent factor that influences our daily life. Recent studies have suggested that pre-established reward association yields strong influence on the spatial allocation of attention. Here we show that reward association can also improve visual working memory (VWM) performance when the reward-associated feature is task-irrelevant. We established the reward association during a visual search training session, and investigated the representation of reward-associated features in VWM by the application of a change detection task before and after the training. The results showed that the improvement in VWM was significantly greater for items in the color associated with high reward than for those in low reward-associated or nonrewarded colors. In particular, the results from control experiments demonstrate that the observed reward effect in VWM could not be sufficiently accounted for by attentional capture toward the high reward-associated item. This was further confirmed when the effect of attentional capture was minimized by presenting the items in the sample and test displays of the change detection task with the same color. The results showed significantly larger improvement in VWM performance when the items in a display were in the high reward-associated color than those in the low reward-associated or nonrewarded colors. Our findings suggest that, apart from inducing space-based attentional capture, the learned reward association could also facilitate the perceptual representation of high reward-associated items through feature-based attentional modulation.

Reward‐related distracters and working memory filtering

“…There is extensive evidence that the presence of reward‐related information impacts information processing in several cognitive domains, including modulating working memory (Jimura, Locke, & Braver, ; Kawasaki & Yamaguchi, ). Two previous studies examined the influence of reward‐related stimuli on working memory performance when this reward information was presented as a distraction from task goals (Gong & Lie, ; Infanti et al, ). Gong and Li examined the influence of reward‐feature associations on working memory performance using a similar approach to the current study.…”

“…Gong and Li had matched all stimuli for salience; therefore, reward distracters may only modulate working memory performance when the distracters are already inherently salient. Importantly, in both Gong and Li () and Infanti and colleagues (), items are only perceived as distracters when items are probed but are task‐relevant items upon encoding. Therefore, it is currently unknown how reward‐related distracters impact working memory when explicitly instructed to be ignored at encoding.…”

The attention habit: how reward learning shapes attentional selection

“…Attentional processing of reward‐associated stimuli predicts related economic risk taking, and value‐driven attentional capture can interfere with the process of value‐based decision making . In the domain of working memory, irrelevant reward associations have been shown to bias the storage of information, with previously reward‐associated stimuli receiving privileged access . The presence of reward‐associated stimuli has also been shown to provide a general boost in working memory, suggesting that this benefit may not be entirely stimulus specific.…”

Reward associations impact both iconic and visual working memory

“…The ability to learn reward contingencies in the environment is crucial to anticipate positive or negative outcomes and optimize valueoriented behavior. Rewards can accordingly act as motivational incentives, guiding the deployment of cognitive resources in order to effectively orient attention and prioritize processing of task relevant information (Engelmann et al, 2009;Pessoa, 2009;Pessoa & Engelmann, 2010;Watanabe, 2007).…”