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

“奖励和显着性如何结合起来影响注意力和感官经济决策？——行为和计算研究”

• 批准号: 0820582
• 负责人: Christof Koch
• 金额: $ 34.1万
• 依托单位: California Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-01 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0820582&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: How; do; reward; salience; combine

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.

一些现实生活中的决策涉及到感官和奖励信息的结合，然而大多数人类和动物文献的先前研究都集中在经济或感官决策的孤立上。拟议的研究通过发展一种行为和计算理解来弥补这一差距，即关于物体的视觉吸引力（显著性）的感官信息和关于其奖励价值的经济信息如何结合起来指导视觉注意力和决策，例如搜索目标是否存在于混乱、分散注意力的背景中；以及下一个目标在哪里。特别是，该研究将调查这种感官经济决策的最优性——人类是否作为奖励最大化的代理行为？这项研究的一个潜在应用是设计奖励激励机制，以发现罕见的、否则会错过的、对生命至关重要的目标（例如，航空乘客行李中的炸弹、医学图像中的癌症和卫星图像中的飞毛腿导弹）。这项研究的影响也延伸到日常决策：当人们去购物时，看到展示的多种商品，他们会看哪里——注意力是被引导到视觉上吸引人的商品上，还是被展示的奖励物品上，还是两者兼而有之？人们所看到的会影响他们购买的东西（他们不能买他们看不到的东西）。对显著性和奖励如何结合起来影响人们观看的地方的定量理解，将有助于设计更好的用户界面和教育和教学材料（例如，在书籍和其他视觉媒体中）的显示，通过增加其视觉显著性和奖励价值，将观众的注意力吸引到重要信息上。