Uncertainty-modulated attentional capture: Outcome variance increases attentional priority.

Our prior experiences shape the way that we prioritize information from the environment for further processing, analysis, and action. We show in three experiments that this process of attentional prioritization is critically modulated by the degree of uncertainty in these previous experiences. Participants completed a visual search task in which they made a saccade to a target to earn a monetary reward. The color of a color-singleton distractor in the search array signaled the reward outcome(s) that were available, with different degrees of variance (uncertainty). Participants were never required to look at the colored distractor, and doing so would slow their response to the target. Nevertheless, across all experiments, participants were more likely to look at distractors associated with high outcome variance versus low outcome variance. This pattern was observed when all distractors had equal expected value (Experiment 1), when the difference in variance was opposed by a difference in expected value (i.e., the high-variance distractor had a low expected value, and vice versa: Experiment 2), and when high- and low-variance distractors were paired with the maximum-value outcome on an equal proportion of trials (Experiment 3). Our findings demonstrate that experience of prediction error plays a fundamental role in guiding "attentional exploration," wherein priority is driven by the potential for a stimulus to reduce future uncertainty through a process of learning, as opposed to maximizing current information gain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Biased choice and incentive salience: Implications for addiction.

Before we can make any choice, we must gather information from the environment about what our options are. This information-gathering process is critically mediated by attention, and our attention is, in turn, shaped by our previous experiences with-and learning about-stimuli and their consequences. In this review, we highlight studies demonstrating a rapid and automatic influence of reward learning on attentional capture and argue that these findings provide a human analog of sign-tracking behavior observed in nonhuman animals-wherein signals of reward gain incentive salience and become attractive targets for attention (and overt behavior) in their own right. We then consider the implications of this idea for understanding the drivers of cue-controlled behavior, with focus on addiction as a case in which choices with regard to reward-related stimuli can become injurious to health. We argue that motivated behavior in general-and addiction in particular-can be understood within a "biased competition" framework: Different options and outcomes compete for attentional priority as a function of top-down goals, bottom-up salience, and prior experience, and the winner of this competition becomes the target for subsequent outcome-directed and flexible behavior. Finally, we outline the implications of the biased-competition framework for cognitive, behavioral, and socioeconomic interventions for addiction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Sign-tracking to non-drug reward is related to severity of alcohol-use problems in a sample of individuals seeking treatment.

BACKGROUND: A prominent neuroscientific theory of drug addiction is the incentive sensitization model. Individual differences in the tendency to ascribe motivational salience to cues that predict reward, and involuntary "sign-tracking" (orientation towards) such cues have been identified as potentially important in understanding vulnerability to addiction and relapse. However, to date this behaviour has not been assessed in a treatment-seeking clinical population, who typically represent those most susceptible to alcohol-related harms and episodes of relapse. This highlights a significant gap in the literature pertaining to incentive sensitization and drug dependence. METHODS: Individuals accessing inpatient drug and alcohol services with alcohol as primary drug of concern were recruited to participate in a Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) intervention. At the baseline assessment, participants completed various self-report measures (including the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test; AUDIT) in addition to a visual search task measuring sign-tracking to cues signalling monetary reward. At 3-month follow up, abstinence from alcohol was the primary outcome measure. All analyses and hypotheses were pre-registered. RESULTS: At baseline (57 participants), AUDIT scores correlated with sign-tracking to signals of monetary reward. In a subsequent regression analysis sign-tracking, gender and self-reported alcohol craving predicted abstinence at 3-month follow up (41 participants). CONCLUSIONS: Our work demonstrates that involuntary sign-tracking to cues signalling non-drug reward is associated with problematic alcohol use and return to use at 3-month follow up, in a treatment-seeking sample. Whether this automatic prioritisation of cues signalling reward is a consequence or vulnerability for problematic alcohol use remains to be investigated.

Effects of outcome revaluation on attentional prioritisation of reward-related stimuli.

Stimuli associated with rewards can acquire the ability to capture our attention independently of our goals and intentions. Here, we examined whether attentional prioritisation of reward-related cues is sensitive to changes in the value of the reward itself. To this end, we incorporated an instructed outcome devaluation (Experiment 1a), "super-valuation" (Experiment 1b), or value switch (Experiment 2) into a visual search task, using eye-tracking to examine attentional prioritisation of stimuli signalling high- and low-value rewards. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we found that prioritisation of high- and low-value stimuli was insensitive to devaluation of a previously high-value outcome, and super-valuation of a previously low-value outcome, even when participants were provided with further experience of receiving that outcome. In Experiment 2, following a value-switch manipulation, we found that prioritisation of a high-value stimulus could not be overcome with knowledge of the new values of outcomes alone. Only when provided with further experience of receiving the outcomes did patterns of attentional prioritisation of high- and low-value stimuli switch, in line with the updated values of the outcomes they signalled. To reconcile these findings, we suggest that participants were motivated to engage in effortful updating of attentional control settings when there was a relative difference between reward values at test (Experiment 2) but that previous settings were allowed to persist when both outcomes had the same value at test (Experiments 1a and 1b). These findings provide a novel framework to further understand the role of cognitive control in driving reward-modulated attention and behaviour.

Value-modulated attentional capture is augmented by win-related sensory cues.

Attentional prioritisation of stimuli in the environment plays an important role in overt choice. Previous research shows that prioritisation is influenced by the magnitude of paired rewards, in that stimuli signalling high-value rewards are more likely to capture attention than stimuli signalling low-value rewards; and this attentional bias has been proposed to play a role in addictive and compulsive behaviours. A separate line of research has shown that win-related sensory cues can bias overt choices. However, the role that these cues play in attentional selection is yet to be investigated. Participants in this study completed a visual search task in which they responded to a target shape in order to earn reward. The colour of a distractor signalled the magnitude of reward and type of feedback on each trial. Participants were slower to respond to the target when the distractor signalled high reward compared to when the distractor signalled low reward, suggesting that the high-reward distractors had increased attentional priority. Critically, the magnitude of this reward-related attentional bias was further increased for a high-reward distractor with post-trial feedback accompanied by win-related sensory cues. Participants also demonstrated an overt choice preference for the distractor that was associated with win-related sensory cues. These findings demonstrate that stimuli paired with win-related sensory cues are prioritised by the attention system over stimuli with equivalent physical salience and learned value. This attentional prioritisation may have downstream implications for overt choices, especially in gambling contexts where win-related sensory cues are common.

Neurophysiological evidence of motor preparation in inner speech and the effect of content predictability.

Self-generated overt actions are preceded by a slow negativity as measured by electroencephalogram, which has been associated with motor preparation. Recent studies have shown that this neural activity is modulated by the predictability of action outcomes. It is unclear whether inner speech is also preceded by a motor-related negativity and influenced by the same factor. In three experiments, we compared the contingent negative variation elicited in a cue paradigm in an active vs. passive condition. In Experiment 1, participants produced an inner phoneme, at which an audible phoneme whose identity was unpredictable was concurrently presented. We found that while passive listening elicited a late contingent negative variation, inner speech production generated a more negative late contingent negative variation. In Experiment 2, the same pattern of results was found when participants were instead asked to overtly vocalize the phoneme. In Experiment 3, the identity of the audible phoneme was made predictable by establishing probabilistic expectations. We observed a smaller late contingent negative variation in the inner speech condition when the identity of the audible phoneme was predictable, but not in the passive condition. These findings suggest that inner speech is associated with motor preparatory activity that may also represent the predicted action-effects of covert actions.

Attentional capture by signals of reward persists following outcome devaluation.

Attention, the mechanism that prioritizes stimuli in the environment for further processing, plays an important role in behavioral choice. In the present study, we investigated the automatic orienting of attention to cues that signal reward. Such attentional capture occurs despite negative consequences, and we investigated whether this counterproductive and reflexive behavior would persist following outcome devaluation. Thirsty participants completed a visual search task in which the color of a distractor stimulus in the search display signaled whether participants would earn water or potato chips for making a rapid eye movement to a diamond target, but looking at the colored distractor was punished by omission of the signaled reward. Nevertheless, participants looked at the water-signaling distractor more frequently than the chip-signaling distractor. Half the participants then drank water ad libitum before continuing with the visual search task. Although the water was now significantly less desirable for half of the participants, there was no difference between groups in the tendency for the water-signaling distractor to capture attention. These findings suggest that once established, counterproductive attentional bias to signals of reward persists even when those outcomes are no longer valuable. This suggests a "habit-like" attentional mechanism that prioritizes reward stimuli in the environment for further action, regardless of whether those stimuli are aligned with current goals or currently desired.

Learning to like triangles: A longitudinal investigation of evaluative conditioning in infancy.

There is tentative evidence that infants can learn preferences through evaluative conditioning to socioemotional stimuli. However, the early development of evaluative conditioning and the factors that may explain infants' capacity to learn through evaluative conditioning are not well understood. Infants (N = 319; 50.2% boys) participated in a longitudinal study where an evaluative conditioning paradigm using socioemotional stimuli was conducted on two occasions (when infants were 7 and 14 months old, on average). We tested whether repeatedly pairing neutral stimuli (triangular and square shapes) with affective stimuli (angry and happy faces) affects infants' preferences for these shapes. At both timepoints, the majority of infants did not choose the shape that was paired with happy faces, indicating that, in general, learning through evaluative conditioning was not present. However, as expected, individual differences were evident such that infants who spent more time fixating on faces compared to shapes (face-preferrers) during the conditioning trials were significantly more likely than non-face-preferrers to choose the shape paired with happy faces, and this effect strengthened with increasing age.

The Neural Bases of Action-Outcome Learning in Humans.

From an associative perspective the acquisition of new goal-directed actions requires the encoding of specific action-outcome (AO) associations and, therefore, sensitivity to the validity of an action as a predictor of a specific outcome relative to other events. Although competitive architectures have been proposed within associative learning theory to achieve this kind of identity-based selection, whether and how these architectures are implemented by the brain is still a matter of conjecture. To investigate this issue, we trained human participants to encode various AO associations while undergoing functional neuroimaging (fMRI). We then degraded one AO contingency by increasing the probability of the outcome in the absence of its associated action while keeping other AO contingencies intact. We found that this treatment selectively reduced performance of the degraded action. Furthermore, when a signal predicted the unpaired outcome, performance of the action was restored, suggesting that the degradation effect reflects competition between the action and the context for prediction of the specific outcome. We used a Kalman filter to model the contribution of different causal variables to AO learning and found that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) tracked changes in the association of the action and context, respectively, with regard to the specific outcome. Furthermore, we found the mPFC participated in a network with the striatum and posterior parietal cortex to segregate the influence of the various competing predictors to establish specific AO associations.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Humans and other animals learn the consequences of their actions, allowing them to control their environment in a goal-directed manner. Nevertheless, it is unknown how we parse environmental causes from the effects of our own actions to establish these specific action-outcome (AO) relationships. Here, we show that the brain learns the causal structure of the environment by segregating the unique influence of actions from other causes in the medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices and, through a network of structures, including the caudate nucleus and posterior parietal cortex, establishes the distinct causal relationships from which specific AO associations are formed.

Reward learning and statistical learning independently influence attentional priority of salient distractors in visual search.

Existing research demonstrates different ways in which attentional prioritization of salient nontarget stimuli is shaped by prior experience: Reward learning renders signals of high-value outcomes more likely to capture attention than signals of low-value outcomes, whereas statistical learning can produce attentional suppression of the location in which salient distractor items are likely to appear. The current study combined manipulations of the value and location associated with salient distractors in visual search to investigate whether these different effects of selection history operate independently or interact to determine overall attentional prioritization of salient distractors. In Experiment 1, high-value and low-value distractors most frequently appeared in the same location; in Experiment 2, high-value and low-value distractors typically appeared in distinct locations. In both experiments, effects of distractor value and location were additive, suggesting that attention-promoting effects of value and attention-suppressing effects of statistical location-learning independently modulate overall attentional priority. Our findings are consistent with a view that sees attention as mediated by a common priority map that receives and integrates separate signals relating to physical salience and value, with signal suppression based on statistical learning determined by physical salience, but not incentive salience.

Still connecting the dots: An investigation into infants' attentional bias to threat using an eye-tracking task.

An attentional bias toward threat has been theorized to be a normative aspect of infants' threat and safety learning, and an indicator of risk for internalizing psychopathology in older populations. To date, only four studies have examined this bias using the dot-probe task in infancy and the findings are mixed. We extended the literature by examining patterns of attention to threat in a culturally and linguistically diverse sample of infants aged 5-11 months old (N = 151) using all measures previously employed in the infant dot-probe literature. Given that an attentional bias toward threat is associated with higher risk of developing anxiety disorders later in life, we also examined how negative affect-an early correlate of later anxiety disorders-is related to attentional bias toward threat in infancy. This study was the first to use a consistent measure of negative affect across the whole sample. An eye-tracking dot-probe task was used to examine attentional bias toward threat (i.e., angry faces) relative to positive (i.e., happy faces) stimuli. Results showed that an attention bias to threat was not characteristic of infants at this age, and negative affect did not moderate the putative relationship between attention and emotional faces (angry, happy). These findings therefore suggest that attention biases to socio-emotional threat may not have emerged by 11 months old.

Nonreactive testing: Evaluating the effect of withholding feedback in predictive learning.

Learning of cue-outcome relationships in associative learning experiments is often assessed by presenting cues without feedback about the outcome and informing participants to expect no outcomes to occur. The rationale is that this "no-feedback" testing procedure prevents new learning during testing that might contaminate the later test trials. We tested this assumption in 4 predictive learning experiments where participants were tasked with learning which foods (cues) were causing allergic reactions (the outcome) in a fictitious patient. We found that withholding feedback in a block of trials had no effect on causal ratings (Experiments 1 and 2), but it led to regression toward intermediate ratings when the missing feedback was embedded in the causal scenario and information about the outcome replaced by a "?" (Experiment 3). A factorial experiment manipulating cover story and feedback revealed that the regression-to-baseline effect was primarily driven by presentation of the "?" feedback (Experiment 4). We conclude that the procedure of testing without feedback, used widely in studies of human cognition, is an appropriate way of assessing learning, as long as the missing data are attributed to the experimenter and the absence of feedback is not highlighted in a way that induces uncertainty. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Reward Rapidly Enhances Visual Perception.

Rewards exert a deep influence on our cognition and behavior. Here, we used a paradigm in which reward information was provided at either encoding or retrieval of a brief, masked stimulus to show that reward can also rapidly modulate perceptual encoding of visual information. Experiment 1 (n = 30 adults) showed that participants' response accuracy was enhanced when a to-be-encoded grating signaled high reward relative to low reward, but only when the grating was presented very briefly and participants reported that they were not consciously aware of it. Experiment 2 (n = 29 adults) showed that there was no difference in participants' response accuracy when reward information was instead provided at the stage of retrieval, ruling out an explanation of the reward-modulation effect in terms of differences in motivated retrieval. Taken together, our findings provide behavioral evidence consistent with a rapid reward modulation of visual perception, which may not require consciousness.

Reward encourages reactive, goal-directed suppression of attention.

Stimuli that signal large reward have an increased likelihood of capturing attention and gaze relative to stimuli that signal small or no reward, even when capture counterproductively prevents reward delivery. These findings suggest that a stimulus's signaling relationship with reward (the contingency between stimulus presentation and reward delivery) is a potent influence on selective attention. Recent studies have also implicated a stimulus's response relationship with reward (the contingency between orienting to a stimulus and reward delivery) in reducing capture by signals of reward. Here we show that this response pathway modulates capture by encouraging a reactive, goal-directed distractor suppression process. In a rewarded visual search task, participants demonstrated an oculomotor preference away from a distractor that had a negative response relationship with high reward (looking at the distractor caused reward omission) and toward a distractor that had no such negative response relationship, providing evidence for the role of the response relationship in suppressing capture by reward-related distractors. Analysis of the temporal dynamics of eye movements suggests that this distractor suppression process operates via a reactive mechanism of rapid disengagement (Experiment 1). Consistent with a goal-directed mechanism, the influence of the response relationship was eliminated when reward was unavailable (Experiment 2). These findings highlight the multifaceted role of stimulus-reward relationships in attentional selection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

You do it to yourself: Attentional capture by threat-signaling stimuli persists even when entirely counterproductive.

Recent research has demonstrated a counterproductive attentional bias toward threat-related stimuli: under conditions in which fixating on a color distractor stimulus sometimes resulted in an immediate shock, participants were nevertheless more likely to look at this threat-related distractor than a neutral distractor matched for physical salience. However, participants in that prior research may not have realized that their own actions caused delivery of aversive outcomes, such that monitoring for the threat-related distractor may not have been counterproductive from participants' perspective. In Experiment 1 of the current study, we demonstrate that the attentional bias to the threat-related distractor persists (and indeed, becomes stronger) when participants are made explicitly aware that looking at this stimulus is the sole cause of aversive events, which are otherwise avoidable. In Experiment 2 we replicate the bias in informed participants under conditions in which there is additional (reward-driven) motivation to avoid attending to distractors. Taken together with prior findings, the observation of an attentional bias toward the threat-related distractor under these explicitly counterproductive conditions provides strong support for the idea that threat-related stimuli are automatically prioritized by our attentional system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

How top-down and bottom-up attention modulate risky choice.

We examine how bottom-up (or stimulus-driven) and top-down (or goal-driven) processes govern the distribution of attention in risky choice. In three experiments, participants chose between a certain payoff and the chance of receiving a payoff drawn randomly from an array of eight numbers. We tested the hypothesis that initial attention is driven by perceptual properties of the stimulus (e.g., font size of the numbers), but subsequent choice is goal-driven (e.g., win the best outcome). Two experiments in which task framing (goal driven) and font size (stimulus driven) were manipulated demonstrated that payoffs with the highest values and the largest font sizes had the greatest impact on choice. The third experiment added a number in large font to the array, which could not be an outcome of the gamble (i.e., a distractor). Eye movement and choice data indicated that although the distractor attracted attention, it had no influence on option selection. Together with computational modeling analyses, the results suggest that perceptual salience can induce bottom-up effects of overt selection but that the perceived value of information is the crucial arbiter of intentional control over risky choice.

A meta-analysis of the relationship between eating restraint, impaired cognitive control and cognitive bias to food in non-clinical samples.

AIM: Food restriction is argued to be a precursor for unhealthy preoccupation with food, possibly leading to the development of an eating disorder. We updated previous meta-analyses that examined the relationship between eating restraint and deficits in either general or food-related attentional and inhibitory control. We hypothesized that inconsistencies in the literature around eating restraint, impaired cognitive control, impulsivity and cognitive biases for food could be attributed to the scale used to measure eating restraint. METHOD: A (preregistered) subgroup meta-analysis examined whether patterns of impaired cognitive control and cognitive bias for food in predominantly healthy (non-clinical) samples differed as a function of the scale used to measure eating restraint. A series of exploratory meta-analyses were carried out for specific attentional bias tasks. In total 57 datasets were included. RESULTS: The subgroup analysis did not provide evidence that the relationship between eating restraint and impaired or biased cognitions differed significantly as a function of restraint scale. Heterogeneity across studies was high. When examining specific attentional bias tasks there was no evidence that increased eating restraint was associated with increased attentional bias or distraction by food cues, regardless of which scale was used to measure eating restraint. CONCLUSIONS: There is little experimental evidence for the common narrative that increased eating restraint is related to impaired cognitive control generally or increased cognitive bias for food, in non-clinical samples.

Reward-Related Attentional Capture Moderates the Association between Fear-Driven Motives and Heavy Drinking.

BACKGROUND: To date, there has been little investigation on how motivational and cognitive mechanisms interact to influence problematic drinking behaviours. Towards this aim, the current study examined whether reward-related attentional capture is associated with reward, fear (relief), and habit drinking motives, and further, whether it interacts with these motives in relation to problematic drinking patterns. METHODS: Ninety participants (mean age = 34.8 years, SD = 9.1, 54% male) who reported having consumed alcohol in the past month completed an online visual search task that measured reward-related attentional capture as well as the Habit Reward Fear Scale, a measure of drinking motives. Participants also completed measures of psychological distress, impulsivity, compulsive drinking, and consumption items of Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test. Regression analyses examined the associations between motives for alcohol consumption and reward-related attentional capture, as well as the associations between reward-related attentional capture, motives, and their interaction, with alcohol consumption and problems. RESULTS: Greater reward-related attentional capture was associated with greater reward motives. Further, reward-related attentional capture also interacted with fear motives in relation to alcohol consumption. Follow-up analyses showed that this interaction was driven by greater fear motives being associated with heavier drinking among those with lower reward-related attentional capture (i.e., "goal-trackers"). CONCLUSION: These findings have implications for understanding how cognition may interact with motives in association with problematic drinking. Specifically, the findings highlight different potential pathways to problematic drinking according to an individual's cognitive-motivational profile and may inform tailored interventions to target profile-specific mechanisms. Finally, these findings offer support for contemporary models of addiction that view excessive goal-directed behaviour under negative affect as a critical contributor to addictive behaviours.

Eating restraint is associated with reduced attentional capture by signals of valuable food reward.

Previous paradigms used to examine attentional distraction by task-irrelevant food words and food images were not suited for the investigation of involuntary and automatic attentional capture. In the current experiments we adapted a well-established visual-search paradigm (with eye tracking) to investigate involuntary attentional capture by food and drink rewards. We first used a satiety procedure to manipulate relative preference for different food and drink outcomes (potato chips and water in Experiment 1 and popcorn and chocolate Smarties in Experiment 2). Participants then performed the visual-search task where a coloured distractor signalled on each trial which of the two food and drink rewards was available for successful identification of the target. The signalled reward was cancelled, however, if any eye gaze was registered on the distractor. Participants were therefore motivated to try and control the automatic orienting of attention towards cues signalling valuable outcomes, in order to earn those outcomes. In both experiments we found that attention was more often captured by the distractor signalling the valuable (non-sated) outcome, replicating previous studies using this paradigm with monetary rewards. We also found that those scoring high on eating restraint (as measured with the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire) were better at controlling reflexive orienting of attention to desirable food rewards. This paradigm offers a novel approach for understanding how reflexive attention and control relate to conflicts in everyday life around distracting food cues, and the moderating role of dietary restraint.

Physiological and subjective validation of a novel stress procedure: The Simple Singing Stress Procedure.

Laboratory stress-induction procedures have been critical in illuminating the effects of stress on human health, cognition, and functioning. Here, we present a novel stress induction procedure, the Simple Singing Stress Procedure (SSSP), that overcomes some of the practical challenges and conceptual limitations of existing procedures in measuring the causal influence of stress on psychological variables. In the stress condition of the SSSP, participants were instructed to sing a song in front of the experimenter while being video- and audio-recorded. Participants were also informed that they would have to sing again at the end of the experiment, and that this second performance would later be assessed by a panel of experimenters. Participants in a no-stress condition instead read lyrics in each phase. Our findings revealed that participants in the stress condition showed significantly higher blood pressure immediately following the initial singing session, as well as heightened salivary cortisol at a latency consistent with the initial singing session, than those in the no-stress condition. Our stress procedure also generated elevations in self-reported stress ratings immediately after the first singing session and subsequently in anticipation of the second singing session, relative to the no-stress condition. Collectively, these findings suggest that the SSSP is a simple and effective stress induction procedure that may be a promising alternative to existing protocols.