"How do reward and salience combine to influence attention and sensory-economic decision making? -- A behavioral and computational study"

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

Several real-life decisions involve combining sensory and reward information, yet most previous research in human and animal literature has focused on either economic or sensory decision making in isolation. The proposed research bridges this gap by developing a behavioral and computational understanding of how sensory information about an object's visual attractiveness (salience) and economic information about its reward value combine to guide visual attention and decisions such as whether a search target is present or not in a cluttered, distracting background; and where to look next to find the target. In particular, the research will investigate the optimality of such sensory-economic decision making - do humans behave as reward-maximizing agents? A potential application of this study is in designing reward incentives to detect rare, life-critical targets that are otherwise missed (e.g., bombs in airline passenger bags, cancers in medical images, and scud missiles in satellite images). The impact of this study extends to everyday decisions as well: when people go shopping and see multiple items on a display, where do they look - is attention guided to visually attractive items or rewarding items in the display or a combination of both? What people see influences what they buy (they cannot buy what they cannot see). A quantitative understanding of how salience and reward combine to influence where people look will lead to better designed user interfaces and displays for education and instruction material (e.g., in books, other visual media), that will draw the viewer's attention to important information by increasing its visual salience and reward value.