Nature Human Behaviour · 1 October 2026 · From issue 46
Intrinsic rewards guide visual resource allocation via reinforcement learning
People focus more on tasks that already feel easy, making hard tasks even harder.
Ivan Tomić, Rodrigo Raimundo et al.
People pay more attention to things that already make them feel sure of themselves. This happens even when there is no money or prize at stake. In vision experiments, people got better at judging things they already judged well. They got worse at judging things they already judged poorly. A computer model combining brain attention rules with a simple reward-learning rule matched these results closely.
Shows that a sense of being right, not just real rewards, biases visual attention in lab tasks.
Lab vision tasks only, no sample size given in the abstract.
Integrity screen: passed (3 checks) Checked 6 October 2026. Retraction record: none. DOI resolves at doi.org. Metadata record found (Nature Human Behaviour). Read the source
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