Attention can be involuntarily biased towards reward-associated distractors (value-driven attentional capture, VDAC). Yet past work has primarily demonstrated this distraction phenomenon during a specific set of circumstances: transient attentional orienting to potentially relevant stimuli occurring in our visual environment. Consequently, it is not well-understood if reward-based attentional capture can occur in other settings, such as during sustained visuospatial attention. Using EEG, we investigated whether associating transient distractors with reward value would increase their distractibility and lead to greater decrements in concurrent sustained spatial attention. Human participants learned to associate three differently colored, laterally presented squares with rewards of varying magnitude (zero, small, large). These colored squares were then periodically reintroduced as distractors at the same lateral locations during a demanding sustained-attention rapid-serial-visual-presentation (RSVP) task at the midline. Behavioral and neural evidence indicated that participants had successfully learned and maintained the reward associations to the distractors. During the RSVP task, consistent with prior work, we found that the distractors generated dips in the instantaneous amplitude of the steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) elicited by the midline RSVP stimuli, indicating that the distractors were indeed transiently disrupting sustained spatial attention. Contrary to our hypotheses, however, the magnitude of this dip did not differ by the magnitude of the distractor’s reward associations. These results indicate that while sustained spatial attention can be impaired by the introduction of distractors at another location, that the main distraction process is resistant to the distractors’ reward associations, thus providing evidence of an important boundary condition to value-driven attentional capture.

中文翻译：

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持续空间注意力的中断可以抵抗干扰者先前的奖励关联

注意力可能会不由自主地偏向与奖励相关的干扰因素（价值驱动的注意力捕获，VDAC）。然而，过去的工作主要证明了在一组特定情况下的这种分心现象：短暂的注意力集中在我们视觉环境中发生的潜在相关刺激上。因此，如果基于奖励的注意力捕获可以发生在其他环境中，例如在持续的视觉空间注意力期间，则不太清楚。使用脑电图，我们调查了将短暂的干扰因素与奖励值相关联是否会增加他们的注意力分散并导致并发持续空间注意力的更大减少。人类参与者学会了将三个不同颜色、横向呈现的方块与不同幅度（零、小、大）的奖励联系起来。然后，在中线要求的持续注意快速串行视觉呈现 (RSVP) 任务期间，这些彩色方块被定期重新引入作为相同横向位置的干扰物。行为和神经证据表明，参与者已经成功地学习并保持了与干扰者的奖励关联。在 RSVP 任务期间，与之前的工作一致，我们发现干扰物在由中线 RSVP 刺激引起的稳态视觉诱发电位 (SSVEP) 的瞬时振幅中产生下降，表明干扰物确实暂时干扰了持续的空间注意力. 然而，与我们的假设相反，这种下降的幅度与干扰者奖励关联的幅度没有区别。