Visual attention modulates the integration of goal-relevant evidence and not value
- University College London, United Kingdom
- Tel Aviv University, Israel
- Princeton University, United States
Abstract
When choosing between options, such as food items presented in plain view, people tend to choose the option they spend longer looking at. The prevailing interpretation is that visual attention increases value. However, in previous studies, 'value' was coupled to a behavioural goal, since subjects had to choose the item they preferred. This makes it impossible to discern if visual attention has an effect on value, or, instead, if attention modulates the information most relevant for the goal of the decision-maker. Here we present the results of two independent studies—a perceptual and a value-based task—that allow us to decouple value from goal-relevant information using specific task-framing. Combining psychophysics with computational modelling, we show that, contrary to the current interpretation, attention does not boost value, but instead it modulates goal-relevant information. This work provides a novel and more general mechanism by which attention interacts with choice.
Data availability
Data and the codes used for this study have been deposited at the Brain Decision Modelling Lab GitHub (https://github.com/BDMLab).
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Sepulveda_et_al_2020GitHub repository, BDM lab Sepulveda_et_al_2020.
Article and author information
Author details
Pradyumna Sepulveda
Funding
Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (Graduate student scholarship - DOCTORADO BECAS CHILE/2017 - 72180193)
- Pradyumna Sepulveda
Wellcome Trust (Sir Henry Dale Fellowship (102612 /A/13/Z))
- Benedetto De Martino
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants signed a consent form and both studies were done following the approval given by the University College London, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences ethics committee (project ID number 1825/003).
Copyright
© 2020, Sepulveda et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Visual attention modulates the integration of goal-relevant evidence and not value
eLife 9:e60705.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60705
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
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