Top-Down Reward Both Decreases and Increases Feature Interference Following a Saccade

Spatial attention is rarely static, but highly dynamic in real-life. Recent studies have revealed that shifts of attention and eye movements incur consequences for ongoing feature perception, such as systematic feature-binding (swapping and mixing) errors. Here we investigated if these consequences could be flexibly mitigated when participants are incentivized, or if feature interference reflects a more automatic byproduct of attentional remapping mechanisms following a saccade. Forty healthy adults were tested in a post-saccadic continuous feature report task and provided with different levels of reward (monetary incentive) for precise target color reports. In addition to improving general performance, reward reduced systematic feature mixing errors immediately after the saccade. However, reward had the opposite effect on retinotopic swapping errors, with higher reward associated with increased swapping errors. These disparate influences of reward provide novel insights into the attentional mechanisms underlying remapping across saccades and dynamic spatial attention and visual perception more generally.