Selective attention moderates the relationship between attentional capture by signals of nondrug reward and illicit drug use

BACKGROUND: The current study examined whether cognitive control moderates the association between (non-drug) reward-modulated attentional capture and use of alcohol and other drugs (AOD). METHODS: Participants were 66 university students who completed an assessment including questions about AOD use, a visual search task to measure value-modulated attentional capture, and a goal-directed selective attention task as a measure of cognitive control. RESULTS: The association between the effect of value-modulated attentional capture and illicit drug use was moderated by level of cognitive control. Among participants with lower levels of cognitive control, value-modulated attentional capture was associated with illicit drug use. This was not the case among participants with higher levels of cognitive control, who instead showed a significant association between illicit drug use and self-reported impulsivity, as well as alcohol use. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide support for models that view addictive behaviours as resulting from interaction and competition between automatic and more reflective processes. That is, the mechanisms that ultimately drive addictive behaviour may differ between people low or high in cognitive control. This has important implications for understanding the development and maintenance of substance use disorders and potentially their treatment and prevention

The effect of predictive history on the learning of sub-sequence contingencies

Two experiments demonstrated that the prior predictive history of a cue governs the extent to which that cue engages in sequence learning. Using a serial reaction time task, we manipulated the predictiveness of the stimulus locations (cues) with respect to the location of the stimulus on the next trial (outcome), such that half of the cues were good predictors of their outcomes, whilst the other half were poorer predictors. Following this, all cues were then paired with novel outcomes. Learning about those cues that were previously established as good predictors proceeded more rapidly than learning for those cues previously established as poor predictors. When the simple recurrent network is modified to include a variable associability parameter, the effects are easily modelled

The Influence of Blocking on Overt Attention and Associability in Human Learning

Previous studies have demonstrated a retardation in the rate of novel learning about previously blocked cues as compared to appropriate control cues. We report an experiment investigating whether this retardation in novel learning about a blocked cue is accompanied by a reduction in attention to this cue, as anticipated by attentional theories of associative learning. Consistent with these theories, eye gaze measures revealed a reduction in overt attention to the blocked cue both during the compound training phase of the blocking procedure, and also during novel learning with respect to new outcomes. Moreover, the extent of the bias in overt attention away from blocked cues was positively correlated with the subsequent reduction in rate of novel learning about these cues

Overt Attention and Predictiveness in Human Contingency Learning

Two experiments used eye-tracking procedures to investigate the relationship between attention and associative learning in human participants. These experiments found greater overt attention to cues experienced as predictive of the outcomes with which they were paired, than to cues experienced as nonpredictive. Moreover, this attentional bias persisted into a second training phase when all cues were equally predictive of the outcomes with which they were paired, and it was accompanied by a related bias in the rate of learning about these cues. These findings are consistent with the attentional model of associative learning proposed by Mackintosh (1975), but not with that proposed by Pearce and Hall (1980)