Chairperson of the Committee

be duplicated without express consent from the author. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincere gratitude goes to Dr. William S. Maki, committee chair, for providing four years of guidance, direction, and encouragement. In addition, I appreciate the experimental design assistance and content suggestions made by my committee: Dr. Kathryn Bleckley, Dr. Patricia DeLucia, Dr. Francis Durso, and Dr. Darcy Reich. A special note of thanks goes to my father, Dr. Larry M. Austin, for his editorial assistance and insightful comments throughout my graduate education. I also appreciate the tireless support and encouragement that I received from my precious mother, Jill C. Austin. I offer a final note of appreciation to Texas Tech University—the many faculty and administrators-- for supporting me in my professional and educational role. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT

Value-driven attentional capture

Attention selects which aspects of sensory input are brought to awareness. To promote survival and well-being, attention prioritizes stimuli both voluntarily, according to context-specific goals (e.g., searching for car keys), and involuntarily, through attentional capture driven by physical salience (e.g., looking toward a sudden noise). Valuable stimuli strongly modulate voluntary attention allocation, but there is little evidence that high-value but contextually irrelevant stimuli capture attention as a consequence of reward learning. Here we show that visual search for a salient target is slowed by the presence of an inconspicuous, task-irrelevant item that was previously associated with monetary reward during a brief training session. Thus, arbitrary and otherwise neutral stimuli imbued with value via associative learning capture attention powerfully and persistently during extinction, independently of goals and salience. Vulnerability to such value-driven attentional capture covaries across individuals with working memory capacity and trait impulsivity. This unique form of attentional capture may provide a useful model for investigating failures of cognitive control in clinical syndromes in which value assigned to stimuli conflicts with behavioral goals (e.g., addiction, obesity)