Effect of reward contingencies on multiple-target visual search

It has long been known that human beings’ search behaviour is influenced by different mechanisms of control of attention: we can voluntarily pay attention, according to the context-specific goals, or we can involuntarily direct it, guided by the physical conspicuity of perceptual objects. Recent evidence suggests that pairing target stimuli with reward can modulate the way in which we voluntarily deploy our attention. In this thesis, the explored line of research focuses on the effects of reward, specifically a monetary reward: neutral stimuli are imbued with value via associative learning, through a training phase. This work aims to investigate if these stimuli will be able to capture attention in a subsequent foraging task. This mechanism, known as value-driven attentional capture, has never been investigated in a foraging context, but only in a classical visual search one: will it be able to influence the search behaviour when the targets are multiple?