Attentional capture by signals of food and drink reward persists following outcome devaluation

Attention, the mechanism that prioritises stimuli in the environment for further processing, plays an important role in behavioural choice. In the current study we investigated the automatic orienting of attention to cues that signal reward. Such attentional capture occurs despite negative consequences, but the sensitivity of this counterproductive and reflexive behaviour to shifts in outcome value has not yet been investigated. Thirsty participants completed a visual-search task, in which the colour of a distractor stimulus in the search display signalled whether participants would earn water or potato chips for making a rapid eye movement to a diamond target, but looking at the coloured distractor was punished by omission of the signalled reward. Nevertheless, participants looked at the water-signalling distractor more frequently than the chips-signalling distractor. Half the participants then drank water ad libitum before continuing with the visual-search task. Although the water was now significantly less desirable for half of the participants, there was no difference between groups in the tendency for the water-signalling distractor to capture attention. These findings suggest that once established, attentional bias to signals of food and drink rewards persists, even when those outcomes are no longer valuable. This suggests a ‘habit-like’ attentional mechanism which prioritises reward stimuli in the environment for further action, regardless of whether those stimuli are aligned with current goals, or currently desired.