This article presents a comprehensive survey of research concerning interactions between
associative learning and attention in humans. Four main findings are described. First …

Motivational stimuli such as rewards elicit adaptive responses and influence various
cognitive functions. Notably, increasing evidence suggests that stimuli with particular …

The lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) has a strong monosynaptic connection with the caudate
nucleus (CdN) of the striatum. Previous human MRI studies have suggested that this LPFC …

Existing visual search research has demonstrated that the receipt of reward will be
beneficial for subsequent perceptual and attentional processing of features that have …

Understanding how reward modulates human behavior and information processing has
been a core challenge for psychologists for decades. In recent years an increasing number …

Human social behavior is fine-tuned by interactions between individuals and their
environments. Here we show that social motivation plays an important role in this process …

Humans and other primates are equipped with a foveated visual system. As a consequence,
we reorient our fovea to objects and targets in the visual field that are conspicuous or that we …

Implicit motives are commonly believed to orient behavior. Despite only sparse empirical
evidence for this claim, an interplay of implicit motives and the attentional system seems …

It is customary when summarizing a body of research to begin with an accepted definition of
the topic under investigation. This is simply not possible for the subject of attention or its …

Rewards constitute crucial signals that motivate approach behavior and facilitate the
perceptual processing of objects associated with favorable outcomes in past encounters …