Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, First floor, Mumbai, Maharashtra, 400076, India.
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Psychol Res. 2019 Nov;83(8):1798-1807. doi: 10.1007/s00426-018-1028-1. Epub 2018 May 24.
Stimuli that reliably herald the availability of rewards or punishers can acquire value associations, potentially imbuing them with emotional significance and attentional prioritization. Previous work has shown that an emotional stimulus (prime) presented just prior to an attention-demanding task disrupts performance in a lateralized manner that is independent of the prime's emotional valence. Here, we asked whether neutral stimuli with acquired value associations would similarly disrupt attention. In two experiments, adult participants first learned to associate specific face or chair stimuli with a high or low probability of either winning or losing points. These conditioned stimuli then served as primes in a speeded letter-search task. Primes with high versus low outcome probability, regardless of valence, slowed search for targets appearing in the left but not the right visual hemifield, mirroring previous results using emotional primes, and suggesting that motivational mechanisms that compete for control with non-emotional cognitive processes are right-lateralized in the human brain.
能够可靠地预示奖励或惩罚的刺激物可以获得价值关联，从而使它们具有情感意义和注意力优先级。先前的研究表明，在注意力要求高的任务之前呈现的情绪刺激（启动刺激）会以与启动刺激的情绪效价无关的方式以偏侧化的方式干扰表现。在这里，我们想知道具有获得的价值关联的中性刺激是否也会类似地干扰注意力。在两项实验中，成年参与者首先学会将特定的面孔或椅子刺激与赢得或输掉分数的高或低概率相关联。然后，这些条件刺激作为快速字母搜索任务中的启动刺激。与低结果概率相比，具有高结果概率的启动刺激（无论效价如何）都会减慢对出现在左视野而不是右视野中的目标的搜索速度，这与先前使用情绪启动刺激的结果相似，表明与非情绪认知过程竞争控制的动机机制在人脑的右侧化。
