Engagement Attentional Bias toward Value-Associated Stimuli

Recent evidence has shown that learning to associate the value of behavioral outcomes with specific stimuli (i.e., value learning/association) can induce attentional capture in a subsequent visual search task. Here we investigated the component of attentional bias toward value-associated stimuli in the dot-probe paradigm. In the training phase, participants learned to associate nonsense shape outlines with monetary wins or losses. The shapes were then used as cues in an explicit no feedback dot-probe task. Probe appeared at either the salient (congruent trial) or nonsalient location (incongruent trial). Results indicate attentional bias toward value-associated stimuli, futher more this attentional bias is driven by an engagement bias.