Recent work on contextual cueing has shown that reward can facilitate context learning, e.g., when salient but task-irrelevant context features signal reward magnitude. Whether task-relevant context features yield a similar facilitating effect is unclear. Also, emergence and persistence of context learning for contexts associated with different reward magnitudes remains unclear. The present study investigated whether reward increases the speed with which context learning emerges, resulting in an earlier but asymptotically similar contextual cueing effect, or whether reward persistently increases context learning, visible as a larger contextual cueing effect on an asymptotical level. Reward was associated to the predominant orientation of the L-distractors, and the number of context repetitions was increased considerably. Results showed contextual cueing, i.e., faster responses and fewer fixations in repeated compared to novel contexts for all reward magnitudes. Moreover, a high reward led to a more pronounced contextual cueing effect. We developed a model-based approach to explicitly assess the non-linear decline and asymptotic level of the response time curves and to quantify how they were altered by reward. A hierarchical Bayesian parameter estimation revealed that reward decreased the asymptotic level of the repeated contexts' response times. Our results therefore show that reward leads to a persistent advantage in contextual cueing rather than to earlier but asymptotically similar context learning.
Keywords: Attention guidance; Contextual cueing; Eye movements; Reward.
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