School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia.
Learn Mem. 2022 Jul 12;29(7):181-191. doi: 10.1101/lm.053569.122. Print 2022 Jul.
Attention, the mechanism that prioritizes stimuli in the environment for further processing, plays an important role in behavioral choice. In the present study, we investigated the automatic orienting of attention to cues that signal reward. Such attentional capture occurs despite negative consequences, and we investigated whether this counterproductive and reflexive behavior would persist following outcome devaluation. Thirsty participants completed a visual search task in which the color of a distractor stimulus in the search display signaled whether participants would earn water or potato chips for making a rapid eye movement to a diamond target, but looking at the colored distractor was punished by omission of the signaled reward. Nevertheless, participants looked at the water-signaling distractor more frequently than the chip-signaling distractor. Half the participants then drank water ad libitum before continuing with the visual search task. Although the water was now significantly less desirable for half of the participants, there was no difference between groups in the tendency for the water-signaling distractor to capture attention. These findings suggest that once established, counterproductive attentional bias to signals of reward persists even when those outcomes are no longer valuable. This suggests a "habit-like" attentional mechanism that prioritizes reward stimuli in the environment for further action, regardless of whether those stimuli are aligned with current goals or currently desired.
注意，环境中用于进一步处理的刺激的优先级机制在行为选择中起着重要作用。在本研究中，我们研究了对信号奖励的线索的自动定向注意。尽管存在负面后果，但这种注意捕获仍会发生，我们研究了在结果贬值后，这种适得其反和反射性的行为是否会持续。口渴的参与者完成了一项视觉搜索任务，在该任务中，搜索显示中的分心刺激的颜色表示参与者通过快速眼动将目光投向钻石目标时将获得水还是薯片，但查看彩色分心物会因取消信号奖励而受到惩罚。尽管如此，参与者还是更频繁地查看水信号分心物而不是芯片信号分心物。然后，一半的参与者在继续进行视觉搜索任务之前自由饮水。尽管现在对于一半的参与者来说，水的吸引力明显降低，但两组参与者在水信号分心物吸引注意力的趋势上没有差异。这些发现表明，一旦建立，即使那些结果不再有价值，对奖励信号的适得其反的注意力偏见也会持续存在。这表明了一种“习惯样”的注意力机制，它优先考虑环境中的奖励刺激以进行进一步的行动，而不管这些刺激是否与当前目标或当前愿望一致。
