Our prior experiences shape the way that we prioritize information from the environment for further processing, analysis, and action. We show in three experiments that this process of attentional prioritization is critically modulated by the degree of uncertainty in these previous experiences. Participants completed a visual search task in which they made a saccade to a target to earn a monetary reward. The color of a color-singleton distractor in the search array signaled the reward outcome(s) that were available, with different degrees of variance (uncertainty). Participants were never required to look at the colored distractor, and doing so would slow their response to the target. Nevertheless, across all experiments, participants were more likely to look at distractors associated with high outcome variance versus low outcome variance. This pattern was observed when all distractors had equal expected value (Experiment 1), when the difference in variance was opposed by a difference in expected value (i.e., the high-variance distractor had a low expected value, and vice versa: Experiment 2), and when high- and low-variance distractors were paired with the maximum-value outcome on an equal proportion of trials (Experiment 3). Our findings demonstrate that experience of prediction error plays a fundamental role in guiding "attentional exploration," wherein priority is driven by the potential for a stimulus to reduce future uncertainty through a process of learning, as opposed to maximizing current information gain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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不确定性调节的注意力捕获：结果差异增加了注意力优先级。


我们之前的经验决定了我们对来自环境的信息进行优先排序以进行进一步处理、分析和采取行动的方式。我们在三个实验中表明，这种注意力优先顺序的过程受到这些先前经历的不确定性程度的严格调节。参与者完成了一项视觉搜索任务，在该任务中，他们向目标进行扫视以获得金钱奖励。搜索数组中颜色单一干扰项的颜色表示可用的奖励结果，具有不同程度的方差（不确定性）。参与者从来不需要看彩色干扰物，这样做会减慢他们对目标的反应。然而，在所有实验中，参与者更有可能关注与高结果方差相关的干扰因素，而不是与低结果方差相关的干扰因素。当所有干扰因素具有相同的期望值（实验 1），当方差差异与期望值差异相反时（即，高方差干扰因素具有低期望值，反之亦然：实验 2），就会观察到这种模式。 ，以及当高方差和低方差干扰因素与同等比例试验中的最大值结果配对时（实验 3）。我们的研究结果表明，预测错误的经验在指导“注意力探索”中发挥着重要作用，其中优先级是由通过学习过程减少未来不确定性的刺激潜力驱动的，而不是最大化当前的信息增益。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。