Perceptual Competition Promotes Suppression of Reward Salience in Behavioral Selection and Neural Representation.

Visual attentional selection is influenced by the value of objects. Previous studies have demonstrated that reward-associated items lead to rapid distraction and associated behavioral costs, which are difficult to override with top-down control. However, it has not been determined whether a perceptually competitive environment could render the reward-driven distraction more susceptible to top-down suppression. Here, we trained both genders of human subjects to associate two orientations with high and low magnitudes of reward. After training, we collected fMRI data while the subjects performed a categorical visual search task. The item in the reward-associated orientation served as the distractor, and the relative physical salience between the target and distractor was carefully controlled to modulate the degree of perceptual competition. The behavioral results showed faster searches in the presence of high, relative to low, reward-associated distractors. However, this effect was evident only if the physical salience of the distractor was higher than that of the target, indicating a context-dependent suppression effect of reward salience that relied on high perceptual competition. By analyzing the fMRI data in primary visual cortex, we found that the behavioral pattern of results could be predicted by the suppressed channel responses tuned to the reward-associated orientation in the distractor location, accompanied by increased responses in the midbrain dopaminergic region. Our results suggest that the learned salience of a reward plays a flexible role in solving perceptual competition, enabling the neural system to adaptively modulate the perceptual representation for behavioral optimization.