Delaying reward feedback does not increase the influence of information on attentional priority in visual search

Rapid attentional capture is shaped by experiences of reward uncertainty: in a visual search task, distractor stimuli that signal uncertain rewards are more likely to capture attention than stimuli that provide diagnostic information about upcoming reward. This pattern of uncertainty-modulated attentional capture (UMAC) runs counter to claims that information-seeking—the drive to identify and exploit sources of predictive information—represents a primary driver of attentional prioritisation. We investigated the possibility that failure to find evidence of information-seeking in prior studies of UMAC was a consequence of immediate provision of reward feedback, negating the value of advance information. In two experiments, we used eye-tracking to examine whether increasing the duration of uncertainty (and hence the potential value of advance information) would promote a pattern of information-seeking in attentional capture. Experiment 1 revealed a general effect of response–feedback delay on the likelihood of capture by salient distractors, but no effect on prioritisation of information: regardless of delay, participants prioritised the noninformative distractor over the informative distractor. Experiment 2 found a similar pattern regardless of whether the delay occurred before or after reward feedback. These findings challenge the idea that information-seeking represents a universal drive for attention, and instead support the idea that—under some conditions—prioritisation can reflect the operation of an ‘attentional exploration’ process that acts to highlight the unknown.