Department of Psychology, University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA ; Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University Nagoya, Japan ; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Tokyo, Japan.
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA ; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program, University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA.
Front Psychol. 2015 Mar 12;6:269. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00269. eCollection 2015.
Learned stimulus-reward associations influence how attention is allocated, such that stimuli rewarded in the past are favored in situations involving limited resources and competition. At the same time, task-irrelevant, high-arousal negative stimuli capture attention and divert resources away from tasks resulting in poor behavioral performance. Yet, investigations of how reward learning and negative stimuli affect perceptual and attentional processing have been conducted in a largely independent fashion. We have recently reported that performance-based monetary rewards reduce negative stimuli interference during perception. The goal of the present study was to investigate how stimuli associated with past monetary rewards compete with negative stimuli during a subsequent attentional task when, critically, no performance-based rewards were at stake. Across two experiments, we found that target stimuli that were associated with high reward reduced the interference effect of potent, negative distractors. Similar to our recent findings with performance-based rewards, our results demonstrate that reward-associated stimuli reduce the deleterious impact of negative stimuli on behavior.
学习到的刺激-奖励关联会影响注意力的分配，例如，过去得到奖励的刺激在涉及有限资源和竞争的情况下会受到青睐。与此同时，与任务无关的、高唤醒的负性刺激会吸引注意力，并将资源从任务中转移开，从而导致行为表现不佳。然而，关于奖励学习和负性刺激如何影响感知和注意力处理的研究一直是在很大程度上独立进行的。我们最近报告说，基于表现的金钱奖励可以减少感知过程中的负性刺激干扰。本研究的目的是调查在随后的注意力任务中，当关键是没有基于表现的奖励时，与过去金钱奖励相关联的刺激与负性刺激如何竞争。在两项实验中，我们发现与高奖励相关联的目标刺激减少了有力的负性干扰物的干扰效应。与我们最近基于表现的奖励的发现类似，我们的结果表明，与奖励相关联的刺激减少了负性刺激对行为的有害影响。
