The goal-relevance of affective stimuli is dynamically represented in affective experience

Affect is a continuous and temporally dependent process that represents an individual's ongoing relationship with its environment. However, there is a lack of evidence on how factors defining the dynamic sensory environment modulate changes in momentary affective experience. Here, we show that goal-dependent relevance of stimuli is a key factor shaping momentary affect in a dynamic context. Participants ( N = 83) viewed sequentially presented images and reported their momentary affective experience after every fourth stimulus. Relevance was manipulated through an attentional task that rendered each image either task-relevant or task-irrelevant. Computational models were fitted to trial-by-trial affective responses to capture the key dynamic parameters explaining momentary affective experience. The findings from statistical analyses and computational models showed that momentary affective experience was shaped by the temporal integration of the affective impact of recently encountered stimuli, and that task-relevant stimuli, independent of stimulus affect, prompted larger changes in experienced pleasantness compared with task-irrelevant stimuli. These findings clearly show that dynamics of affective experience reflect goal-relevance of stimuli in our surroundings.

Alpha oscillations and event related potentials reflect distinct dynamics of attribute construction and evidence accumulation in dietary decision making

How does regulatory focus alter attribute value construction (AVC) and evidence accumulation (EA)? We recorded EEG during food choices while participants responded naturally or regulated their choices by attending to health attributes or decreasing attention to taste attributes. Using a drift diffusion model, we predicted the time course of neural signals associated with AVC and EA. Results suggested that event-related-potentials (ERPs) correlated with the time course of model-predicted taste-attribute signals, with no modulation by regulation. By contrast, suppression of frontal and occipital alpha power correlated with the time course of EA, tracked tastiness according to its goal relevance, and predicted individual variation in successful down-regulation of tastiness. Additionally, an earlier rise in frontal and occipital theta power represented food tastiness more strongly during regulation, and predicted a weaker influence of food tastiness on behaviour. Our findings illuminate how regulation modifies the representation of attributes during the process of evidence accumulation.

Filling the gaps: Cognitive control as a critical lens for understanding mechanisms of value-based decision-making

Research into value-based decision making has made tremendous progress in identifying behavioral and neural correlates of choice value. However, these correlates have been primarily viewed through a field-specific lens, focusing on how they contribute to the evaluation and selection between options to arrive at a choice. Here, we reveal blind-spots resulting from this limited perspective, and how they can be filled in through taking the perspective of cognitive control. We highlight three particular insights that this perspective offers: (1) a view towards the goal-relevance of one’s options and their features; (2) a view of decision-making correlates as a proxy for monitoring to determine control adjustments; (3) a view of those correlates as a proxy for monitoring that extends temporally and hierarchically beyond the immediate choice task. We show how adopting these complementary perspectives offers new insight into the determinants of both decisions and control; alternative interpretations for common findings in the neuroeconomic literature; and fruitful directions for future research.

Goal Relevance and Desirability of Virtuous Behavior in Satisfying Affiliative and Pathogen Avoidance Needs

Recent findings suggest that behavioral repertoires frequently conceptualized as virtuous possess a fundamental nature that implicates virtues as highly desirable in facilitating group living through factors of caring, self-control, and inquisitiveness. Although much of this desirability has previously demonstrated in mating domains, it could be possible their benefits extend to affiliative and pathogen-avoidant domains. Two studies (N=285) sought to determine the potential costs and benefits of associating with virtuous individuals (Study 1) and how these affordances could shape subsequent interpersonal preferences (Study 2). In Study 1, participants inferred a caring behavioral repertoire as particularly effective at facilitating both affiliative and pathogen-avoidant goals, whereas inquisitiveness was perceived as threatening to pathogen-avoidant goals. Study 2 provides evidence dispositionally heightened affiliative interests heightened preferences for caring, but pathogen-avoidant motives did not influence preferences. I frame results from an evolutionary perspective and synthesize it with recent findings demonstrating how virtue shapes effective group living.

How we pay attention in naturalistic settings

Research on attentional control has largely focused on single senses and the importance of one s behavioural goals in controlling attention. However, everyday situations are multisensory and contain regularities, both likely influencing attention. We investigated how visual attentional capture is simultaneously impacted by top-down goals, multisensory nature of stimuli, and contextual factors of stimulus semantic relationship and predictability. Participants performed a multisensory version of the Folk et al., (1992) spatial cueing paradigm, searching for a target of a predefined colour (e.g. a red bar) within an array preceded by a distractor. We manipulated: 1) stimulus goal-relevance via distractor s colour (matching vs. mismatching the target), 2) stimulus multisensory nature (colour distractors appearing alone vs. with tones), 3) relationship between the distractor sound and colour (arbitrary vs. semantically congruent) and 4) predictability of the distractor onset. Reaction-time spatial cueing served as a behavioural measure of attentional selection. We also recorded 129-channel event-related potentials (ERPs), analysing the distractor elicited N2pc component both canonically and using a multivariate electrical neuroimaging (EN) framework. Behaviourally, arbitrary target-matching distractors captured attention more strongly than semantically congruent ones, with no evidence for context modulating multisensory enhancements of capture. Notably, EN analyses revealed context-based influences on attention to both visual and multisensory distractors, in how strongly they activated the brain and type of activated brain networks. In both cases, these context-driven brain response modulations occurred long before the N2pc timewindow, with network-based modulations at app. 30ms, followed by strength-based modulations at app. 100ms post-distractor. This points to meaning being a second source, next to predictions, of contextual information facilitating goal-directed behaviour. More broadly, in everyday situations, attentional is controlled by an interplay between one s goals, stimulus perceptual salience and stimulus meaning and predictability. Our study calls for a revision of attentional control theories to account for the role of contextual and multisensory control.

Alpha and theta oscillations contribute to attribute regulation in dietary decision making under self-control

How do different cognitive self-regulation strategies alter attribute value construction (AVC) and evidence accumulation (EA)? We recorded EEG during food choices while participants responded naturally or regulated their choices by focusing on healthy eating or decreasing their desire for all food. Using a drift diffusion model (DDM), we predicted the time course of neural signals associated with AVC and EA. Results suggested that suppression of frontal and occipital alpha power matched model-predicted EA signals: it tracked the goal-relevance of tastiness and healthiness attributes, predicted individual differences in successful down-regulation of tastiness, and conformed to the DDM-predicted time course of EA. We also found an earlier rise in frontal and occipital theta power that represented food tastiness more strongly during regulation, and predicted a weaker influence of food tastiness on behaviour. Our findings suggest that different regulatory strategies may commonly recruit theta-mediated control processes to modulate the attribute influence on EA.