Pupil dilation reflects effortful action invigoration in overcoming aversive Pavlovian biases.

"Pavlovian" or "motivational" biases describe the phenomenon that the valence of prospective outcomes modulates action invigoration: Reward prospect invigorates action, whereas punishment prospect suppresses it. The adaptive role of these biases in decision-making is still unclear. One idea is that they constitute a fast-and-frugal decision strategy in situations characterized by high arousal, e.g., in presence of a predator, which demand a quick response. In this pre-registered study (N = 35), we tested whether such a situation-induced via subliminally presented angry versus neutral faces-leads to increased reliance on Pavlovian biases. We measured trial-by-trial arousal by tracking pupil diameter while participants performed an orthogonalized Motivational Go/NoGo Task. Pavlovian biases were present in responses, reaction times, and even gaze, with lower gaze dispersion under aversive cues reflecting "freezing of gaze." The subliminally presented faces did not affect responses, reaction times, or pupil diameter, suggesting that the arousal manipulation was ineffective. However, pupil dilations reflected facets of bias suppression, specifically the physical (but not cognitive) effort needed to overcome aversive inhibition: Particularly strong and sustained dilations occurred when participants managed to perform Go responses to aversive cues. Conversely, no such dilations occurred when they managed to inhibit responses to Win cues. These results suggest that pupil diameter does not reflect response conflict per se nor the inhibition of prepotent responses, but specifically effortful action invigoration as needed to overcome aversive inhibition. We discuss our results in the context of the "value of work" theory of striatal dopamine.

Prefrontal signals precede striatal signals for biased credit assignment in motivational learning biases.

Actions are biased by the outcomes they can produce: Humans are more likely to show action under reward prospect, but hold back under punishment prospect. Such motivational biases derive not only from biased response selection, but also from biased learning: humans tend to attribute rewards to their own actions, but are reluctant to attribute punishments to having held back. The neural origin of these biases is unclear. Specifically, it remains open whether motivational biases arise primarily from the architecture of subcortical regions or also reflect cortical influences, the latter being typically associated with increased behavioral flexibility and control beyond stereotyped behaviors. Simultaneous EEG-fMRI allowed us to track which regions encoded biased prediction errors in which order. Biased prediction errors occurred in cortical regions (dorsal anterior and posterior cingulate cortices) before subcortical regions (striatum). These results highlight that biased learning is not a mere feature of the basal ganglia, but arises through prefrontal cortical contributions, revealing motivational biases to be a potentially flexible, sophisticated mechanism.

EEGManyPipelines: A Large-scale, Grassroots Multi-analyst Study of Electroencephalography Analysis Practices in the Wild.

The ongoing reproducibility crisis in psychology and cognitive neuroscience has sparked increasing calls to re-evaluate and reshape scientific culture and practices. Heeding those calls, we have recently launched the EEGManyPipelines project as a means to assess the robustness of EEG research in naturalistic conditions and experiment with an alternative model of conducting scientific research. One hundred sixty-eight analyst teams, encompassing 396 individual researchers from 37 countries, independently analyzed the same unpublished, representative EEG data set to test the same set of predefined hypotheses and then provided their analysis pipelines and reported outcomes. Here, we lay out how large-scale scientific projects can be set up in a grassroots, community-driven manner without a central organizing laboratory. We explain our recruitment strategy, our guidance for analysts, the eventual outputs of this project, and how it might have a lasting impact on the field.

Goal-directed recruitment of Pavlovian biases through selective visual attention.

Prospective outcomes bias behavior in a "Pavlovian" manner: Reward prospect invigorates action, while punishment prospect suppresses it. Theories have posited Pavlovian biases as global action "priors" in unfamiliar or uncontrollable environments. However, this account fails to explain the strength of these biases-causing frequent action slips-even in well-known environments. We propose that Pavlovian control is additionally useful if flexibly recruited by instrumental control. Specifically, instrumental action plans might shape selective attention to reward/punishment information and thus the input to Pavlovian control. In two eye-tracking samples (N = 35/64), we observed that Go/NoGo action plans influenced when and for how long participants attended to reward/punishment information, which in turn biased their responses in a Pavlovian manner. Participants with stronger attentional effects showed higher performance. Thus, humans appear to align Pavlovian control with their instrumental action plans, extending its role beyond action defaults to a powerful tool ensuring robust action execution. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Cortical dopamine reduces the impact of motivational biases governing automated behaviour.

Motivations shape our behaviour: the promise of reward invigorates, while in the face of punishment, we hold back. Abnormalities of motivational processing are implicated in clinical disorders characterised by excessive habits and loss of top-down control, notably substance and behavioural addictions. Striatal and frontal dopamine have been hypothesised to play complementary roles in the respective generation and control of these motivational biases. However, while dopaminergic interventions have indeed been found to modulate motivational biases, these previous pharmacological studies used regionally non-selective pharmacological agents. Here, we tested the hypothesis that frontal dopamine controls the balance between Pavlovian, bias-driven automated responding and instrumentally learned action values. Specifically, we examined whether selective enhancement of cortical dopamine either (i) enables adaptive suppression of Pavlovian control when biases are maladaptive; or (ii) non-specifically modulates the degree of bias-driven automated responding. Healthy individuals (n = 35) received the catechol-o-methyltransferase (COMT) inhibitor tolcapone in a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled cross-over design, and completed a motivational Go NoGo task known to elicit motivational biases. In support of hypothesis (ii), tolcapone globally decreased motivational bias. Specifically, tolcapone improved performance on trials where the bias was unhelpful, but impaired performance in bias-congruent conditions. These results indicate a non-selective role for cortical dopamine in the regulation of motivational processes underpinning top-down control over automated behaviour. The findings have direct relevance to understanding neurobiological mechanisms underpinning addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorders, as well as highlighting a potential trans-diagnostic novel mechanism to address such symptoms.

Striatal BOLD and Midfrontal Theta Power Express Motivation for Action.

Action selection is biased by the valence of anticipated outcomes. To assess mechanisms by which these motivational biases are expressed and controlled, we measured simultaneous EEG-fMRI during a motivational Go/NoGo learning task (N = 36), leveraging the temporal resolution of EEG and subcortical access of fMRI. VmPFC BOLD encoded cue valence, importantly predicting trial-by-trial valence-driven response speed differences and EEG theta power around cue onset. In contrast, striatal BOLD encoded selection of active Go responses and correlated with theta power around response time. Within trials, theta power ramped in the fashion of an evidence accumulation signal for the value of making a "Go" response, capturing the faster responding to reward cues. Our findings reveal a dual nature of midfrontal theta power, with early components reflecting the vmPFC contribution to motivational biases, and late components reflecting their striatal translation into behavior, in line with influential recent "value of work" theories of striatal processing.

Seven steps toward more transparency in statistical practice.

We argue that statistical practice in the social and behavioural sciences benefits from transparency, a fair acknowledgement of uncertainty and openness to alternative interpretations. Here, to promote such a practice, we recommend seven concrete statistical procedures: (1) visualizing data; (2) quantifying inferential uncertainty; (3) assessing data preprocessing choices; (4) reporting multiple models; (5) involving multiple analysts; (6) interpreting results modestly; and (7) sharing data and code. We discuss their benefits and limitations, and provide guidelines for adoption. Each of the seven procedures finds inspiration in Merton's ethos of science as reflected in the norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness and organized scepticism. We believe that these ethical considerations-as well as their statistical consequences-establish common ground among data analysts, despite continuing disagreements about the foundations of statistical inference.

Explore or reset? Pupil diameter transiently increases in self-chosen switches between cognitive labor and leisure in either direction.

When people invest effort in cognitive work, they often keep an eye open for rewarding alternative activities. Previous research suggests that the norepinephrine (NE) system regulates such trade-offs between exploitation of the current task and exploration of alternative possibilities. We examined the possibility that the NE system is involved in another trade-off, i.e., the trade-off between cognitive labor and leisure. We conducted two pre-registered studies (total N = 62) in which participants freely chose to perform either a paid 2-back task (labor) versus a non-paid task (leisure), while we tracked their pupil diameter-which is an indicator of the state of the NE system. In both studies, consistent with prior work, we found (a) increases in pupil baseline and (b) decreases in pupil dilation when participants switched from labor to leisure. Unexpectedly, we found the same pattern when participants switched from leisure back to labor. Both increases in pupil baseline and decreases in pupil dilation were short-lived. Collectively, these results are more consistent with a role of norepinephrine in reorienting attention and task switching, as suggested by network reset theory, than with a role in motivation, as suggested by adaptive gain theory.

May the power be with you: are there highly powered studies in neuroscience, and how can we get more of them?

Statistical power is essential for robust science and replicability, but a meta-analysis by Button et al. in 2013 diagnosed a "power failure" for neuroscience. In contrast, Nord et al. ( J Neurosci 37: 8051-8061, 2017) reanalyzed these data and suggested that some studies feature high power. We illustrate how publication and researcher bias might have inflated power estimates, and review recently introduced techniques that can improve analysis pipelines and increase power in neuroscience studies.

Dissociating implicit wanting from implicit liking: Development and validation of the Wanting Implicit Association Test (W-IAT).

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Wanting and liking reflect different phenomena that can be dissociated. In the present research, we develop and validate an implicit measure of wanting, the Wanting Implicit Association Test (W-IAT). To examine the validity of the W-IAT, we compared it with a standard liking IAT (L-IAT) and a semantic pseudo-wanting IAT (PW-IAT) in a context where wanting-liking dissociations have been established by previous research. Specifically, we predicted that heterosexual male participants prefer attractive female over attractive male faces in the new wanting IAT, whereas no such asymmetry should be obtained for the liking and pseudo-wanting IATs. METHODS: The rationale of the W-IAT consists in endowing one of the two attribute responses in the IAT with a truly motivational wanting quality, which allows assessment of stimulus-response compatibility effects between target stimuli and responses that are based on motivational wanting. To establish the motivational quality of the wanting response, participants are made thirsty with salty snacks before the test. During the W-IAT, participants obtain water as an action effect of the response with which they categorize drinks into the attribute category "I want". As target stimuli for which the strength of implicit wanting was to be assessed in the IAT, attractive and unattractive male and female faces had to be classified on the basis of their attractiveness. RESULTS: In the W-IAT, participants (heterosexual and male) showed a stronger implicit preference for attractive female over attractive male faces. No such difference was found for implicit liking (assessed with a standard valence IAT) and for the pseudo-wanting IAT (using only semantic labels of wanting and not wanting). LIMITATIONS: Future research is needed to validate the W-IAT in other motivational contexts besides attractive faces (e.g., addiction, craving) and to identify the elements of the procedure that are critical for establishing an implicit measure of wanting. CONCLUSION: Results suggest that the W-IAT is a valid measure of implicit wanting.