LAUSR

Previous studies suggest that a reward-associated salient distractor can induce bottom-up attentional capture. Hitherto, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying attentional allocation upon reward/loss associated nonsalient stimulus remain hardly investigated. The present study built the association between nonsalient stimuli and value, and tested it with a decision-making task. Consequently, we examined whether and how reward/loss-associated nonsalient stimuli (as distractors) influenced attentional allocation in a rapid serial visual presentation task. Behavioral analysis showed a significantly faster recognition of target in the loss condition compared to performance in the neutral/reward conditions. Electrophysiological results showed that reward-associated distractors induced a significant Pd component, while loss-associated distractors induced a significantly higher theta oscillation. These results demonstrated that subjects could proactively suppress reward-associated distractors. More importantly, we showed that attentional allocation upon reward/loss-associated nonsalient distractors is supported by distinct neural mechanisms.