scholarly journals Monetary and non-monetary rewards reduce attentional capture by emotional distractors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
AT Walsh ◽  
David Podhortzer Carmel ◽  
David Harper ◽  
P Bolitho ◽  
Georgina Grimshaw
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Monetary Reward ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Emotional Stimuli ◽  
Letter Identification ◽  
Identification Task ◽  
Monetary Rewards ◽  
Accurate Performance

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Irrelevant emotional stimuli often capture attention, disrupting ongoing cognitive processes. In two experiments, we examined whether availability of rewards (monetary and non-monetary) can prevent this attentional capture. Participants completed a central letter identification task while attempting to ignore negative, positive, and neutral distractor images that appeared above or below the targets on 25% of trials. Distraction was indexed by slowing on distractor-present trials. Half the participants completed the task with no performance-contingent reward, while the other half earned points for fast and accurate performance. In Experiment 1, points translated into monetary reward, but in Experiment 2, points had no monetary value. In both experiments, reward reduced capture by emotional distractors, showing that even non-monetary reward can aid attentional control. These findings suggest that motivation encourages use of effective cognitive control mechanisms that effectively prevent attentional capture, even when distractors are emotional.

scholarly journals Monetary and non-monetary rewards reduce attentional capture by emotional distractors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
AT Walsh ◽  
David Podhortzer Carmel ◽  
David Harper ◽  
P Bolitho ◽  
Georgina Grimshaw
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Monetary Reward ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Emotional Stimuli ◽  
Letter Identification ◽  
Identification Task ◽  
Monetary Rewards ◽  
Accurate Performance

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Irrelevant emotional stimuli often capture attention, disrupting ongoing cognitive processes. In two experiments, we examined whether availability of rewards (monetary and non-monetary) can prevent this attentional capture. Participants completed a central letter identification task while attempting to ignore negative, positive, and neutral distractor images that appeared above or below the targets on 25% of trials. Distraction was indexed by slowing on distractor-present trials. Half the participants completed the task with no performance-contingent reward, while the other half earned points for fast and accurate performance. In Experiment 1, points translated into monetary reward, but in Experiment 2, points had no monetary value. In both experiments, reward reduced capture by emotional distractors, showing that even non-monetary reward can aid attentional control. These findings suggest that motivation encourages use of effective cognitive control mechanisms that effectively prevent attentional capture, even when distractors are emotional.

How Does Threat Modulate the Motivational Effects of Reward on Attention?

2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 165-172
Author(s):  
Andy J. Kim ◽  
Brian A. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Selective Attention ◽  
Attentional Bias ◽  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Voluntary Attention ◽  
Identification Task ◽  
Negative Arousal ◽  
Task Goals ◽  
Visual Domain ◽  
Threat Of Shock

Abstract. Studies on attentional bias have overwhelmingly focused on the priority of different stimuli and have rarely manipulated the state of the observer. Recently, the threat of unpredictable shock has been utilized to experimentally induce anxiety and investigate how negative arousal modulates attentional control. Experimentally induced anxiety has been shown to reduce the attentional priority afforded to reward-related stimuli while enhancing the efficiency of goal-directed attentional control. It is unclear which of these two influences might dominate when attending to reward-related stimuli is consistent with task goals and by extension what the scope of the modulatory influence of threat on attention is. In contrast to paradigms in the visual domain, a novel auditory identification task has demonstrated a robust influence of target-value associations on selective attention. In the present study, we examined how the threat of shock modulates the influence of learned value on voluntary attention. In both threat and no-threat conditions, we replicate prior findings of voluntary prioritization of reward-associated sounds. However, unlike in studies measuring involuntary attentional capture, threat did not modulate the influence of reward on attention. Our findings highlight important limitations to when and how threat modulates the control of attention, contextualizing prior findings.

scholarly journals Controlling the flow of interruption in working memory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Hakim ◽  
Tobias Feldmann-Wüstefeld ◽  
Edward Awh ◽  
Edward K Vogel
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Alpha Power ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
New Information ◽  
Contralateral Delay Activity ◽  
Component Processes

AbstractVisual working memory (WM) must maintain relevant information, despite the constant influx of both relevant and irrelevant information. Attentional control mechanisms help determine which of this new information gets access to our capacity-limited WM system. Previous work has treated attentional control as a monolithic process–either distractors capture attention or they are suppressed. Here, we provide evidence that attentional capture may instead be broken down into at least two distinct sub-component processes: 1) spatial capture, which refers to when spatial attention shifts towards the location of irrelevant stimuli, and 2) item-based capture, which refers to when item-based WM representations of irrelevant stimuli are formed. To dissociate these two sub-component processes of attentional capture, we utilized a series of EEG components that track WM maintenance (contralateral delay activity), suppression (distractor positivity), item individuation (N2pc), and spatial attention (lateralized alpha power). We show that relevant interrupters trigger both spatial and item-based capture, which means that they undermine WM maintenance more. Irrelevant interrupters, however, only trigger spatial capture from which ongoing WM representations can recover more easily. This fractionation of attentional capture into distinct sub-component processes provides a framework by which the fate of ongoing WM processes after interruption can be explained.

Attentional capture helps explain why moral and emotional content go viral

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Brady ◽  
Ana P. Gantman ◽  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Psychological Process ◽  
Emotional Stimuli ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Lab Experiments ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
Shed Light

Our social media newsfeeds are filled with a variety of content all battling for our limited attention. Across three studies, we investigated whether moral and emotional content captures our attention more than other content and if this may help explain why this content is more likely to go viral online. Using a combination of controlled lab experiments and nearly 50,000 political tweets, we found that moral and emotional content are prioritized in early visual attention more than neutral content, and that such attentional capture is associated with increased retweets during political conversations online. Furthermore, we found that the differences in attentional capture among moral and emotional stimuli could not be fully explained by differences in arousal. These studies suggest that attentional capture is one basic psychological process that helps explain the increased diffusion of moral and emotional content during political discourse on social media, and shed light on ways in which political leaders, disinformation profiteers, marketers, and activist organizations can spread moralized content by capitalizing on natural tendencies of our perceptual systems.

How adolescents and adults translate motivational value to action: Age-related shifts in strategic physical effort exertion for monetary rewards

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra M Rodman ◽  
Katherine Powers ◽  
Catherine Insel ◽  
Erik K Kastman ◽  
Katherine Kabotyanski ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Early Adulthood ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Incentive Motivation ◽  
Reward Processing ◽  
Monetary Reward ◽  
Physical Effort ◽  
Monetary Rewards ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Adolescents And Adults

Adults titrate the degree of physical effort they are willing to expend according to the magnitude of reward they expect to obtain, a process guided by incentive motivation. However, it remains unclear whether adolescents, who are undergoing normative developmental changes in cognitive and reward processing, translate incentive motivation into action in a way that is similarly tuned to reward value and economical in effort utilization. The present study adapted a classic physical effort paradigm to quantify age-related changes in motivation-based and strategic markers of effort exertion for monetary rewards from adolescence to early adulthood. One hundred and three participants aged 12-23 years completed a task that involved exerting low or high amounts of physical effort, in the form of a hand grip, to earn low or high amounts of money. Adolescents and young adults exhibited highly similar incentive-modulated effort for reward according to measures of peak grip force and speed, suggesting that motivation for monetary reward is consistent across age. However, young adults expended energy more economically and strategically: whereas adolescents were prone to exert excess physical effort beyond what was required to earn reward, young adults were more likely to strategically prepare before each grip phase and conserve energy by opting out of low reward trials. This work extends theoretical models of development of incentive-driven behavior by demonstrating that layered on similarity in motivational value for monetary reward, there are important differences in the way behavior is flexibly adjusted in the presence of reward from adolescence to young adulthood.

scholarly journals Neural Dynamics of Cognitive Control over Working Memory Capture of Attention

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (7) ◽  
pp. 1079-1090 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter S. Whitehead ◽  
Mathilde M. Ooi ◽  
Tobias Egner ◽  
Marty G. Woldorff
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Search ◽  
Cognitive Control ◽  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Search Display ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
High Temporal Resolution ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Attentional Orienting ◽  
Behavioral Studies

The contents of working memory (WM) guide visual attention toward matching features, with visual search being faster when the target and a feature of an item held in WM spatially overlap (validly cued) than when they occur at different locations (invalidly cued). Recent behavioral studies have indicated that attentional capture by WM content can be modulated by cognitive control: When WM cues are reliably helpful to visual search (predictably valid), capture is enhanced, but when reliably detrimental (predictably invalid), capture is attenuated. The neural mechanisms underlying this effect are not well understood, however. Here, we leveraged the high temporal resolution of ERPs time-locked to the onset of the search display to determine how and at what processing stage cognitive control modulates the search process. We manipulated predictability by grouping trials into unpredictable (50% valid/invalid) and predictable (100% valid, 100% invalid) blocks. Behavioral results confirmed that predictability modulated WM-related capture. Comparison of ERPs to the search arrays showed that the N2pc, a posteriorly distributed signature of initial attentional orienting toward a lateralized target, was not impacted by target validity predictability. However, a longer latency, more anterior, lateralized effect—here, termed the “contralateral attention-related negativity”—was reduced under predictable conditions. This reduction interacted with validity, with substantially greater reduction for invalid than valid trials. These data suggest cognitive control over attentional capture by WM content does not affect the initial attentional-orienting process but can reduce the need to marshal later control mechanisms for processing relevant items in the visual world.

scholarly journals Dissociable early attentional control mechanisms underlying cognitive and affective conflicts

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Taolin Chen ◽  
Keith M. Kendrick ◽  
Chunliang Feng ◽  
Shiyue Sun ◽  
Xun Yang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Control ◽  
Control Mechanisms

scholarly journals Top–Down Attentional Control in Parkinson's Disease: Salient Considerations

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 848-859 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roshan Cools ◽  
Robert Rogers ◽  
Roger A. Barker ◽  
Trevor W. Robbins
Keyword(s):  
Parkinson’S Disease ◽  
Parkinson's Disease ◽  
Attentional Control ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Set Shifting ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Salient Dimension ◽  
Dimensional Salience

Cognitive dysfunction in Parkinson's disease (PD) has been hypothesized to reflect a failure of cortical control. In keeping with this hypothesis, some of the cognitive deficits in PD resemble those seen in patients with lesions in the lateral pFC, which has been associated with top–down attentional control. However, there is no direct evidence for a failure of top–down control mechanisms in PD. Here we fill this gap by demonstrating disproportionate control by bottom–up attention to dimensional salience during attentional set shifting. Patients needed significantly more trials to criterion than did controls when shifting to a low-salient dimension while, remarkably, needing significantly fewer trials to criterion than did controls when shifting to a high-salient dimension. Thus, attention was captured by bottom–up attention to salient information to a greater extent in patients than in controls. The results provide a striking reinterpretation of prior set-shifting data and provide the first direct evidence for a failure of top–down attentional control, resembling that seen after catecholamine depletion in the pFC.

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