Abstract
It is well known that monetary value enhances visual perception and attention (Pessoa 2015) and boosts activity in the primary visual cortex (Pooresmaeili et al, 2014), however, it is still unknown whether monetary reward can modulate visual awareness. To investigate this issue, we performed a psychophysical experiment using a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm. Suppression times of sinusoidal gratings (orientation ±45°, size 2°, SF: 2cpd) under CFS were measured in a group of 11 subjects (4 males, mean age: 26±6 years) before and after a short (100 trials) session of implicit learning in which each of the two possible grating orientations were associated either with high or low monetary reward. In a control condition during the training session the two orientations were associated with similar monetary rewards but had different contrasts (80–40%). We found that monetary reward modulated CFS by promoting dominance of the grating associated with high-reward over that associated with low reward (RM-ANOVA, F(3,30)=5.42, p=0.004). Specifically, suppression durations of the visual stimulus associated with high reward were on average 800 ms shorter after the training (t(10)=4.31, p=0.006) compared to baseline measurements, whereas the suppression duration of the stimulus associated with low reward did not change after training. Suppression durations did not change in the control experiment, indicating that the effect of monetary reward could not be attributable to low-level saliency of the visual stimulus. These results show that monetary reward modulates visual awareness by facilitating the access to awareness of visual stimuli associated with high monetary value, probably by boosting top-down modulation of activity in the early visual cortex. References Pessoa L. Multiple influences of reward on perception and attention. Vis cogn 2015;23(1–2):272–290. Pooresmaeili A, et al. Cross-modal effects of value on perceptual acuity and stimulus encoding. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 2014;111(42):15244–15249.