Rewards modulate saccade latency but not exogenous spatial attention

Dunne, S.; Ellison, A.; Smith, D.T.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01080

Rewards modulate saccade latency but not exogenous spatial attention

Dunne, S.; Ellison, A.; Smith, D.T.

Authors

S. Dunne

Professor Amanda Ellison amanda.ellison@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Professor Dan Smith daniel.smith2@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

The eye movement system is sensitive to reward. However, whilst the eye movement system is extremely flexible, the extent to which changes to oculomotor behavior induced by reward paradigms persist beyond the training period or transfer to other oculomotor tasks is unclear. To address these issues we examined the effects of presenting feedback that represented small monetary rewards to spatial locations on the latency of saccadic eye movements, the time-course of learning and extinction of the effects of rewarding saccades on exogenous spatial attention and oculomotor inhibition of return. Reward feedback produced a relative facilitation of saccadic latency in a stimulus driven saccade task which persisted for three blocks of extinction trials. However, this hemifield-specific effect failed to transfer to peripheral cueing tasks. We conclude that rewarding specific spatial locations is unlikely to induce long-term, systemic changes to the human oculomotor or attention systems.

Citation

Dunne, S., Ellison, A., & Smith, D. (2015). Rewards modulate saccade latency but not exogenous spatial attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 1080. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01080

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jul 13, 2015
Online Publication Date	Jul 28, 2015
Publication Date	Jul 28, 2015
Deposit Date	Oct 2, 2015
Publicly Available Date	Oct 13, 2015
Journal	Frontiers in Psychology
Print ISSN	1664-1078
Electronic ISSN	1664-1078
Publisher	Frontiers Media
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	6
Article Number	1080
DOI	https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01080
Keywords	Saccade, Instrumental, Reward, Learning, IOR, Exogenous attention, Oculomotor, Premotor theory.
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1398828

Files

Published Journal Article (237 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2015 Dunne, Ellison and Smith. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.