Abstract: PURPOSE: Traditionally, attentional control has been driven primarily by top-down (target-directed) and bottom-up (stimulus-driven) ways. Recent research has proposed a new attentional control mode, that is, value-driven attentional capture and mainly focused on reward association and selection history. Previous studies have focused on whether value association can really drive the attentional capture of individual, because in the literature with opposing views, similar results can also be obtained without reward learning. Current study attempts to reinvestigate the capture effects of accuracy-based feedback, internal feedback, and previous targets mixed in the VDAC paradigm.
METHODS: The present study explores the components of VDAC effects by a variant of VDAC paradigm. The study consisted of three experiments and each experiment was conducted in two phases: the training phase and the test phase. In Experiment 1, the accuracy feedback was presented during feedback display in training phase to investigate whether the accuracy-associated stimulus captures the attention of the participants during the test phase. The training phase of the Experiment 2 removed the accuracy-based feedback, and a self-report question (“Do you think the response you just made is correct?”) would be presented after the response of participants to explore the effect of internal feedback. The training phase of Experiment 3 completely removed the feedback display to explore the roles of the stimulus only as previous targets in the attentional capture. The test phases are the same in all three experiments.
RESULTS: Significant distractor-capture effects were found in all three experiments, that is, RTs in distractor-present condition were significantly longer than distractor-absent condition, indicating that accuracy-based feedback, internal feedback, and even previous targets can drive attentional capture.
CONCLUSIONS: Current study suggests that the traditional VDAC effects are at least mixed with value, accuracy-based feedback, internal feedback and the previous targets four components.

Key words: value-driven attentional capture, accuracy-based feedback, internal feedback, previous targets