Loss of precise auditory sampling as a sign of value-driven visual attentional capture

Conditioning sensory signals endows persistent salience that influences attention, even when their presence no longer connects with rewards. These irrelevant distractors also shape multisensory processing, but how do effects sustain throughout continuous encoding remains poorly understood. We test if value-driven capture interferes with the ability of cortical activity to reliably phase-lock to temporal modulations in audiovisual (AV) signals. Listening to periodically-modulated sound, observers discriminated between two visual object streams flickering at different rates, in order to identify an AV match. Peripheral color cues were shown simultaneously, and evaluated for their ability to modulate participant responses due to a color-reward associative training taken beforehand. Behavioral sensitivity and electroencephalography recordings show that performance impoverished in presence of colors previously associated with reward, as did the phase locking of AV responses. Decreased temporal precision predicted participants’ reward-driven distraction, evidencing the attentional shift away from temporal representations of the multimodal target. Consistency loss was also confirmed in auditory responses, identifying a previously unknown effect of value-driven attentional capture to withdraw from unimodal tracking fidelity. The findings offer understanding on the effective inter-modal competition set out when tracking incentive salience cues overtakes goal-oriented tracking of multisensory streams connected in time.