Theories of reinforcement learning and approach behavior suggest that reward can increase
the perceptual salience of environmental stimuli, ensuring that potential predictors of …

Estimating reward contingencies and allocating attentional resources to a subset of relevant
information are the most important contributors to increasing adaptability of an organism …

What role does reward play in real-world human vision? Reward coding in the midbrain is
thought to cause the rapid prioritization of reward-associated visual stimuli. However …

Some stimuli can orient attentional resources and access awareness even if they appear
outside the focus of voluntary attention. Stimuli with low-level perceptual salience and stimuli …

Long-term spatial contextual memories are a rich source of predictions about the likely
locations of relevant objects in the environment and should enable tuning of neural …

Success in a dynamically changing world requires both rapid shifts of attention to the
location of important objects and the detection of changes in motivational contingencies that …

We hypothesized that novel stimuli represent salient learning signals that can motivate
'exploration'in search for potential rewards. In computational theories of reinforcement …

Selecting visual information from cluttered real-world scenes involves the matching of visual
input to the observer's attentional set—an internal representation of objects that are relevant …

Appetitive stimuli such as monetary incentives often improve performance whereas aversive
stimuli such as task-irrelevant negative stimuli frequently impair performance. But our …

Attention provides the gateway to cognition, by selecting certain stimuli for further analysis.
Recent research demonstrates that whether a stimulus captures attention is not determined …