Prediction and prioritisation: Reward learning modulates automatic attentional priority

A traditional view of selective attention distinguishes between goal-directed and stimulus-driven mechanisms of attentional control. More recently, a large (and growing) body of research has identified a third class of control system—termed selection history—wherein attentional prioritisation is shaped by our prior experience with stimuli, independently of our goals and the physical salience of those stimuli. In this talk I will examine how prioritisation is rapidly and automatically modulated by learning about the rewards associated with stimuli. These findings provide an analogy to the phenomenon of sign-tracking in nonhuman animals, and are linked to real-world addictive and compulsive behaviours. More generally, such demonstrations of attentional plasticity raise the possibility that motivated behaviour in general—and addiction in particular—can be understood within a “biased competition” framework: different options and outcomes compete for attentional priority, and the winner of this competition becomes the target for subsequent outcome-directed behaviour.

Speaker
Dr. Mike Le Pelley
UNSW Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Mike Le Pelley is a professor of cognitive psychology at UNSW Sydney in Sydney, Australia. His main research focus explores how attention and learning interact. He completed his PhD and the Sir Alan Wilson Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, before moving to Cardiff University, and in 2011 to UNSW as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. In recent years, he has received grant funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, and the Australian Department of Defence. He has published around 150 papers and book chapters, and received the Experimental Psychology Society’s Mid-Career Award in 2025.