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Reward association facilitates distractor suppression in human visual search

Although valuable objects are attractive in nature, people often encounter situations where they would prefer to avoid such distraction while focusing on the task goal. Contrary to the typical effect of attentional capture by a reward‐associated item, we provide evidence for a facilitation effect derived from the active suppression of a high reward‐associated stimulus when cuing its identity as distractor before the display of search arrays. Selection of the target is shown to be significantly faster when the distractors were in high reward‐associated colour than those in low reward‐associated or non‐rewarded colours. This behavioural reward effect was associated with two neural signatures before the onset of the search display: the increased frontal theta oscillation and the strengthened top‐down modulation from frontal to anterior temporal regions. The former suggests an enhanced working memory representation for the reward‐associated stimulus and the increased need for cognitive control to override Pavlovian bias, whereas the latter indicates that the boost of inhibitory control is realized through a frontal top‐down mechanism. These results suggest a mechanism in which the enhanced working memory representation of a reward‐associated feature is integrated with task demands to modify attentional priority during active distractor suppression and benefit behavioural performance.