Attention refers to the set of cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the prioritization of incoming sensory information. Existing research suggests that motivationally salient stimuli, such as those associated with reward, are prioritized by the attention system and that this prioritization occurs independently of an observer's goals. Specifically, studies of visual search have shown that stimuli signalling the availability of monetary reward are more likely to capture eye movements, even when participants are motivated to ignore such stimuli. In the current study we ask whether reward magnitude influences only the likelihood that stimuli will capture spatial attention, or whether reward also influences the ease with which people can disengage attention from a location when they are motivated to move their attention elsewhere. Three experiments examined the time taken to disengage from a centrally presented distractor that signalled the availability of high or low reward. We found that participants took longer to move their eyes away from a high-reward distractor, even though this came at financial cost (Experiment 1), that participants were unable to suppress a high-reward distractor consistently presented at the central location (Experiment 2), that slower responding was not due to behavioural freezing in the presence of a signal of high reward (Experiment 3), and that slower responding persisted even when rewards were no longer available (Experiment 4). These results indicate that reward modulates attentional disengagement: signals of high reward hold attention for longer, even when this is counterproductive for performance of ongoing tasks. Our findings further highlight the role of reward in the conflict between automatic and goal-directed attentional processing.

中文翻译：

---

注意力从注意力分散的人延迟脱离，表示奖励。

注意是指有助于对传入的感官信息进行优先排序的一组认知机制。现有研究表明，注意力集中了动机上显着的刺激（例如与奖励相关的刺激），并且这种优先级独立于观察者的目标而发生。具体而言，视觉搜索的研究表明，即使有动机忽略参与者的眼球，刺激信号也表明金钱奖励的有效性更容易引起眼球运动。在当前的研究中，我们询问奖励幅度是否仅影响刺激物吸引空间注意力的可能性，或者奖励是否也影响人们在将注意力转移到其他地方时将注意力从某个位置分离的难易程度。三个实验检查了从一个集中呈现的干扰器脱离的时间，该干扰器指示了高奖励或低奖励的可用性。我们发现，参与者花了更长的时间将目光从高回报的干扰物上移开，即使这是经济上的损失（实验1），参与者也无法抑制始终出现在中心位置的高回报的干扰物（实验2） ），较慢的响应不是由于在出现高额奖励信号的情况下行为冻结而引起的（实验3），并且即使不再获得奖励，响应较慢的现象仍然存在（实验4）。这些结果表明，奖励调节注意力的脱离：高奖励的信号可使注意力保持更长的时间，即使这对正在进行的任务的执行适得其反。