Motivational salience guides attention to valuable and threatening stimuli: Evidence from behaviour and fMRI

Abstract

Rewarding and aversive outcomes have opposing effects on behaviour, facilitating approach and avoidance, although we need to accurately anticipate each type of outcome in order to behave effectively. Attention is biased toward stimuli that have been learned to predict either type of outcome, and it remains an open question whether such orienting is driven by separate systems for value- and threat-based orienting or whether there exists a common underlying mechanism of attentional control driven by motivational salience. Here we provide a direct comparison of the neural correlates of value- and threat-based attentional capture following associative learning. Across multiple measures of behaviour and brain activation, our findings overwhelmingly support a motivational salience account of the control of attention. We conclude that there exists a core mechanism of experience-dependent attentional control driven by motivational salience, and that prior characterisations of attention as being value-driven or supporting threat monitoring need to be revisited.

An adaptive view of attentional control.

“…Behaviorally, reward learning and punishment learning typically have comparable effects on the orienting of attention (Anderson & Kim, 2018c; Watson et al, 2019). Compellingly, the neural correlates of attentional capture by previously reward-associated (see Anderson, 2019) and previously punishment-associated stimuli appear indistinguishable (Kim et al, in press). Given that each type of stimulus serves as a valent signal for a biologically significant outcome, the brain leverages a mechanism for assigning attentional priority to such stimuli that shapes the orienting response in the same way regardless of whether the associated outcome is positive or negative; whether the outcome associated with a stimulus is positive or negative is not informative with respect to whether the stimulus should be attended, and as such the attention system does not discriminate on the basis of such information.…”

“…Although the need to orient to signals for reward and punishment may itself be valence-independent (Kim et al, in press), the behavioral response demanded by the stimuli associated with these two types of outcomes is diametrically opposed. Reward-associated stimuli signal the need for approach behavior while punishment-associated stimuli signal the need for avoidance behavior.…”