Delayed disengagement of attention from distractors signalling reward

Attention refers to the set of cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the prioritization of incoming sensory information. Existing research suggests that motivationally salient stimuli, such as those associated with reward, are prioritized by the attention system and that this prioritization occurs independently of an observer's goals. Specifically, studies of visual search have shown that stimuli signalling the availability of monetary reward are more likely to capture eye movements, even when participants are motivated to ignore such stimuli. In the current study we ask whether reward magnitude influences only the likelihood that stimuli will capture spatial attention, or whether reward also influences the ease with which people can disengage attention from a location when they are motivated to move their attention elsewhere. Three experiments examined the time taken to disengage from a centrally presented distractor that signalled the availability of high or low reward. We found that participants took longer to move their eyes away from a high-reward distractor, even though this came at financial cost (Experiment 1), that participants were unable to suppress a high-reward distractor consistently presented at the central location (Experiment 2), that slower responding was not due to behavioural freezing in the presence of a signal of high reward (Experiment 3), and that slower responding persisted even when rewards were no longer available (Experiment 4). These results indicate that reward modulates attentional disengagement: signals of high reward hold attention for longer, even when this is counterproductive for performance of ongoing tasks. Our findings further highlight the role of reward in the conflict between automatic and goal-directed attentional processing

The effect of experience and instructions on learned attentional biases

Afiliaciones: Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Málaga (IBIMA), University of Malaga, Spain Primary Care and Public Health Sciences, King’s College London, UK School of Psychology, UNSW Australia, Sydney, AustraliaIt has been shown that selective attention is allocated to the best available predictor of an outcome, which is known as learned predictiveness. Mitchell et al. (2012) have shown that instructions about the ‘relevance’ of each stimulus can influence (and even reverse) the learned predictiveness attentional bias, suggesting that propositional reasoning plays a crucial role in this phenomenon. Our experiment further explores the effects of instructions on this learned attentional bias. As a difference with previous work, we measured attentional capture through spatial cueing effects, which have been found to rely on rapid attentional processes (Le Pelley et al., 2013). Participants responded faster to events presented in the spatial location cued by stimuli that had previously been trained as predictive through trial-by-trial learning. However, verbal instructions regarding relevance failed to speed up participants’ responses or to modulate the effect of learned predictiveness on spatial cueing. These results suggest that predictive stimuli produce an attentional bias which is not (always) under voluntary control.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The role of uncertainty in attentional and choice exploration

The exploitation-exploration (EE) trade-off describes how, when making a decision, an organism must often choose between a safe alternative with a known pay-off, and one or more riskier alternatives with uncertain pay-offs. Recently, the concept of the EE trade-off has been extended to the examination of how organisms distribute limited attentional resources between several stimuli. This work suggests that when the rules governing the environment are certain, participants learn to “exploit” by attending preferentially to cues that provide the most information about upcoming events. However, when the rules are uncertain, people “explore” by increasing their attention to all cues that may provide information to help in predicting upcoming events. In the current study, we examine how uncertainty affects the EE trade-off in attention using a contextual two-armed bandit task, where participants explore with both their attention and their choice behavior. We find evidence for an influence of uncertainty on the EE trade-off in both choice and attention. These findings provide support for the idea of an EE trade-off in attention, and that uncertainty is a primary motivator for exploration in both choice and attentional allocation

Outcome predictability biases cued search

Within the domain of associative learning, there is substantial evidence that people (and other animals) select amongst environmental cues on the basis of their reinforcement history. Specifically, people preferentially attend to, and learn about, cueing stimuli that have previously predicted events of consequence (a predictiveness bias). By contrast, relatively little is known about whether people prioritize some (to-be-predicted) outcome events over others on the basis of their past experience with those outcomes (a predictability bias). The present experiments assessed whether the prior predictability of a stimulus results in a learning bias in a contingency learning task, as such effects are not anticipated by formal models of associative learning. Previously unpredictable stimuli were less readily learned about than previously predictable stimuli. This pattern is unlikely to reflect the use of strategic search processes or blocking of learning by the context. Instead we argue that our findings are most consistent with the operation of a biased learning mechanism

Cross‐modal symbolic processing can elicit either an N2 or a protracted N2/N400 response

"This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Griffiths, O., Le Pelley, M. E., Jack, B. N., Luque, D., & Whitford, T. J. (2016). Cross-modal symbolic processing can elicit either an N2 or a protracted N2/N400 response. Psychophysiology, 53(7), 1044–1053. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.12649 , which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.12649. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions."A cross‐modal symbolic paradigm was used to elicit EEG activity related to semantic incongruence. Twenty‐five undergraduate students viewed pairings of visual lexical cues (e.g., DOG) with congruent (50% of trials) or incongruent (50%) auditory nonlexical stimuli (animal vocalizations; e.g., sound of a dog woofing or a cat meowing). In one condition, many different pairs of congruent/incongruent stimuli were shown, whereas in a second condition only two pairs of stimuli were repeatedly shown. A typical N400‐like pattern of incongruence‐related activity (including activity in the N2 time window) was evident in the condition using many stimuli, whereas the incongruence‐related activity in the two‐stimuli condition was confined to differential N2‐like activity. A supplementary analysis excluded stimulus characteristics as the source of this differential activity between conditions. We found that a single individual performing a fixed task can demonstrate either a protracted N400‐like pattern of activity or a more temporally focused N2‐like pattern of activity in response to the same stimulus, which suggests that the N2 may be a precursor to the protracted N400 response

Reward-related attentional capture is associated with severity of addictive and obsessive-compulsive behaviors

A cue that signals reward can capture attention and elicit approach behaviors in people and animals. The current study examined whether attentional capture by reward-related cues is associated with severity of addiction-related and obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Participants were recruited via Mechanical Turk and included 143 adults [mean age 34 years (SD = 8.5), 43% female] who had endorsed at least one addiction-related or obsessive-compulsive behavior in the past month. All assessment components were delivered via the internet, and included questionnaires to assess severity of compulsivity-related problems across addiction-related and obsessive-compulsive behaviors, as well as a visual search task to measure reward-related attentional capture. Reward-related attentional capture was associated with severity of compulsivity, transdiagnostically. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms that underlie compulsive behaviors and suggest that reward-related attentional capture is a promising transdiagnostic cognitive risk marker for compulsivity

Compulsivity is measurable across distinct psychiatric symptom domains and is associated with familial risk and reward-related attentional capture.

BACKGROUND: Compulsivity can be seen across various mental health conditions and refers to a tendency toward repetitive habitual acts that are persistent and functionally impairing. Compulsivity involves dysfunctional reward-related circuitry and is thought to be significantly heritable. Despite this, its measurement from a transdiagnostic perspective has received only scant research attention. Here we examine both the psychometric properties of a recently developed compulsivity scale, as well as its relationship with compulsive symptoms, familial risk, and reward-related attentional capture. METHODS: Two-hundred and sixty individuals participated in the study (mean age = 36.0 [SD = 10.8] years; 60.0% male) and completed the Cambridge-Chicago Compulsivity Trait Scale (CHI-T), along with measures of psychiatric symptoms and family history thereof. Participants also completed a task designed to measure reward-related attentional capture (n = 177). RESULTS: CHI-T total scores had a normal distribution and acceptable Cronbach's alpha (0.84). CHI-T total scores correlated significantly and positively (all p < 0.05, Bonferroni corrected) with Problematic Usage of the Internet, disordered gambling, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, alcohol misuse, and disordered eating. The scale was correlated significantly with history of addiction and obsessive-compulsive related disorders in first-degree relatives of participants and greater reward-related attentional capture. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that the CHI-T is suitable for use in online studies and constitutes a transdiagnostic marker for a range of compulsive symptoms, their familial loading, and related cognitive markers. Future work should more extensively investigate the scale in normative and clinical cohorts, and the role of value-modulated attentional capture across compulsive disorders

Reward-related attentional capture and cognitive inflexibility interact to determine greater severity of compulsivity-related problems.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Neurocognitive processes are key drivers of addictive and compulsive disorders. The current study examined whether reward-related attentional capture and cognitive inflexibility are associated with impulsive and/or compulsive personality traits, and whether these cognitive characteristics interact to predict greater compulsivity-related problems across obsessive-compulsive and drinking behaviors. METHODS: One-hundred and seventy-three participants (mean age = 34.5 years, S.D = 8.4, 42% female) completed an online visual search task to measure reward-related attentional capture and its persistence following reversal of stimulus-reward contingencies. Participants also completed questionnaires to assess trait impulsivity, compulsivity, alcohol use, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors. RESULTS: Greater reward-related attentional capture was associated with trait compulsivity, over and above all impulsivity dimensions, while greater cognitive inflexibility was associated with higher negative urgency (distress-elicited impulsivity). Reward-related attentional capture and cognitive inflexibility interacted to predict greater compulsivity-related problems among participants who reported obsessive-compulsive behaviors in the past month (n = 57) as well as current drinkers (n = 88). Follow-up analyses showed that, for OCD behaviors, this interaction was driven by an association between higher reward-related attentional capture and more problematic behaviors among cognitively inflexible participants only. For drinking, the same pattern was seen, albeit at trend level. LIMITATIONS: This study includes a non-clinical, online sample and is cross-sectional, thus its findings need to be interpreted with these limitations in mind. CONCLUSIONS: Reward-related attentional capture and cognitive flexibility are related to trait compulsivity and impulsivity (negative urgency) respectively, and interact to determine more problematic behaviors