Flavors of desire: Cognitive representations of appetitive stimuli and their motivational implications.

How do people cognitively represent appetitive stimuli? Do interactions with appetitive stimuli shape how we think about them, and do such representations affect motivation to consume? Although much is known about how people respond to appetitive stimuli, little is known about how they are represented. We examine this in the domain of sugar-sweetened drinks, which constitute a significant self-control problem for many people. Given people's rich and diverse learning histories of consuming them, we propose that representations of these stimuli will show high variability, and that they will reflect idiosyncratic simulations, or reenactments, of previous consumption experiences. Representing drinks in terms of consuming and enjoying them may predict the motivation to consume. In three experiments (total N = 457), participants described nonalcoholic drinks in a "feature listing task," a free production task to assess cognitive representations of concepts through natural language. We also measured consumption frequency, desire to drink, and intake (Experiment 3), and we measured (Experiments 1 and 2) or manipulated (Experiment 3) thirst. Illustrating the variability of participants' representations of drinks, participants reported a large number of different features (210-331 unique features per drink). Drinks were described heavily with words related to consumption and reward experiences, especially sugary drinks, and especially when consumed frequently. Consumption and reward features predicted desire and intake, more strongly than thirst. These findings suggest that simulations of previous rewarding interactions play a key role in representations of appetitive stimuli, and that understanding these representations may be useful across domains of appetitive behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Reward-driven distraction: A meta-analysis.

People have a strong tendency to attend to reward cues, even if these cues are irrelevant to their current goal or their current task. When reward cues are goal-irrelevant, their presence may impair cognitive performance. In this meta-analysis, we quantitatively examined the rapidly growing literature on the impact of reward-related distractors on cognitive performance. We included 91 studies (N = 2,362) that used different cognitive paradigms (e.g., visual search, conflict processing) and reward-related stimuli (e.g., money, attractive food). Overall, results showed that reward-related distractors impaired cognitive performance across different tasks and stimuli, with a small effect size (standardized mean change = .347). Between-study heterogeneity was large, suggesting that researchers can plausibly expect to sometimes find reversed effects (i.e., reward-related distractors boosting performance). We further showed that the average reward-driven distraction effect was robust across different reward-learning mechanisms, contexts, and methodological choices, and that this effect existed regardless of explicit task instructions to ignore distractors. In sum, the findings of this meta-analysis support the notion that cognitive processes can be thwarted by reward cues. We discuss these findings against the background of distraction-related phenomena as they are studied in clinical, educational, and work psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Ruminative minds, wandering minds: Effects of rumination and mind wandering on lexical associations, pitch imitation and eye behaviour.

This study demonstrates that rumination is reflected in two behavioural signals that both play an important role in face-to-face interactions and provides evidence for the negative impact of rumination on social cognition. Sixty-one students were randomly assigned either to a condition in which rumination was induced or to a control condition. Their task was to play a speech-based word association game with an Embodied Conversational Agent during which their word associations, pitch imitation and eye movements were measured. Two questionnaires assessed their ruminative tendencies and mind wandering thoughts, respectively. Rumination predicted differences in task-related mind wandering, polarity of lexical associations, pitch imitation, and blinks while mind wandering predicted differences in saccades. This outcome may show that rumination has a negative impact on certain aspects of social interactions.

Reward-associated distractors can harm cognitive performance.

When people carry out cognitive tasks, they sometimes suffer from distractions, that is, drops in performance that occur close in time to task-irrelevant stimuli. In this research, we examine how the pursuit of rewards contributes to distractions. In two experiments, participants performed a math task (in which they could earn monetary rewards vs. not) while they were exposed to task-irrelevant stimuli (that were previously associated with monetary rewards vs. not). In Experiment 1, irrelevant cues that were previously associated with rewards (vs. not) impaired performance. In Experiment 2, this effect was only replicated when these reward-associated distractors appeared relatively early during task performance. While the results were thus somewhat mixed, they generally support the idea that reward associations can augment the negative effect of distractors on performance.