School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, 6012, New Zealand.
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, UK.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Aug;25(4):1556-1562. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1414-5.
Using cognitive control to ignore distractions is essential for successfully achieving our goals. In emotionally-neutral contexts, motivation can reduce interference from irrelevant stimuli by enhancing cognitive control. However, attention is commonly biased towards emotional stimuli, making them potent distractors. Can motivation aid control of emotional distractions, and does it do so similarly for positive and negative stimuli? Here, we examined how task motivation influences control of distraction from positive, negative, and neutral scenes. Participants completed a simple perceptual task while attempting to ignore task-irrelevant images. One group received monetary reward for fast and accurate task performance; another (control) group did not. Overall, both negative (mutilation) and positive (erotic) images caused greater slowing of responses than neutral images of people, but emotional distraction was reduced with reward. Crucially, despite the different motivational directions associated with negative and positive stimuli, reward reduced negative and positive distraction equally. Our findings suggest that motivation may encourage the use of a sustained proactive control strategy that can effectively reduce the impact of emotional distraction.
利用认知控制来忽略干扰对于成功实现目标至关重要。在情绪中性的情境中，动机可以通过增强认知控制来减少无关刺激的干扰。然而，注意力通常偏向于情绪刺激，使它们成为强大的干扰源。动机能否帮助控制情绪干扰，并且对正性和负性刺激的控制方式是否相同？在这里，我们研究了任务动机如何影响对正性、负性和中性场景的干扰的控制。参与者在执行简单的感知任务时，试图忽略与任务无关的图像。一组参与者因快速准确地完成任务而获得金钱奖励；另一组（对照组）则没有。总的来说，负性（肢解）和正性（色情）图像比中性人物图像引起的反应速度更慢，但奖励可以减少情绪干扰。至关重要的是，尽管负性和正性刺激与不同的动机方向相关联，但奖励同样减少了负性和正性的干扰。我们的研究结果表明，动机可能会鼓励使用持续的主动控制策略，从而有效地减少情绪干扰的影响。
