Motivation alters implicit temporal attention through sustained and transient mechanisms: A behavioral and pupillometric study

Abstract

Temporal expectations aid performance by allowing the optimization of attentional readiness at moment of highest target probability. Reward enhances cognitive performance through its action on preparatory and reactive attentional processes. To elucidate how motivation interacts with mechanisms of implicit temporal attention, we studied healthy young adult participants (N = 73) performing a sustained attention task with simultaneous pupillometric recording, under different reward conditions (baseline: 0 c; reward: 10 c/fast response). Target timing was temporally unpredictable (variable foreperiod: 2-10 s, uniformly distributed), in which case implicitly formed timing expectations. Trials were binned according to current foreperiod (FP ; short: 2-6 s; long: 6-10 s) and preceding foreperiod (FP ; short: 2-6 s; long: 6-10 s). Overall, performance data showed the expected temporal attention effects, with slower responses after shorter FP s, particularly when they followed longer FP s. Moreover, these temporal effects were significantly reduced in the reward condition. While performance improved in all trial types, the largest benefit appeared in trials that were normally most disadvantaged by invalid temporal expectation. Furthermore, reward motivation was accompanied by an increase in sustained (prestimulus) and transient (poststimulus response) pupil diameter. The latter effect was particularly evident following short FP s. The current findings suggest that reward motivation can improve overall attentional performance and reduce implicit temporal bias, both through preparatory and reactive attentional mechanisms.

Reward motivation normalises temporal attention after sleep deprivation

“…Such control mechanisms may serve to maintain higher levels of arousal/alertness throughout the waiting period, and/or by reactively mobilising compensatory resources whenever targets appear at moments of low readiness (i.e. short FPs; Massar et al., 2018a).…”

“…This has further implications on how the FP-effect is influenced by the history of FPs in preceding trials (a phenomenon called the sequential effect). Previous research has shown that the sequential effect is affected by SD (Kong et al, 2015) and by motivation (Massar et al, 2018a). The current task structure did not provide a sufficient number of trials to perform a fine-grained analysis on the sequential effect, and was not designed to arbitrate between the different theoretical accounts.…”

“…monetary reward; Horne & Pettit, 1985). Moreover, incentives can reduce the magnitude of the FP-effect in well-rested states (Massar, Lim, Sasmita, & Chee, 2018a). It is presently not known if reward can alter the exaggerated temporal bias in response preparation in the sleepdeprived state.…”

Dissociable influences of implicit temporal expectation on attentional performance and mind wandering

“…amounting to a total of 16 probes per foreperiod duration. Each task run contained Power analysis based on recent studies from our lab using the same PVT task as the 1 current study indicated that behavioral foreperiod effects are robust (partial-h 2 : 0.705-0.817) 2 (Massar et al, 2018;Sasmita et al, 2018), and a sample sizes of N = 6 to N = 8 would be 3 sufficient to detect these effects with power = 90% and alpha = .05. However, no prior 4 studies have examined the effect of foreperiod duration on mind wandering.…”

Reward supports flexible orienting of attention to category information and influences subsequent memory

“…be enhanced by the expectation of monetary rewards. Enhanced reactive control (Boehler, Schevernels, Hopf, Stoppel, & Krebs, 2014;Engelmann & Pessoa, 2007;Massar, Sasmita, Lim, & Chee, 2018) and greater attentional flexibility (Shen & Chun, 2011) are two potential additional benefits of anticipating reward. The reorienting of attention involves the disengagement and updating of original goal representations, and is essential for resolving cue-target incongruence.…”