Neural evidence that inhibition is linked to the affective devaluation of distractors that match the contents of working memory

Vito, David De; Al-Aidroos, Naseem; Fenske, Mark J.

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.03.022

Cited by 16 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Many prior studies of distractor devaluation have included a novel baseline condition in which ratings were obtained for previously-unseen items with no history of being either attended or ignored in prior trials (De Vito, Al-Aidroos, & Fenske, 2017;Duff & Faber, 2011;Goolsby, Shapiro, Silvert, et al, 2009;Griffiths & Mitchell, 2008;Kihara, Yagi, Takeda, & Kawahara, 2011;Martiny-Huenger et al, 2014;Raymond et al, 2003;Veling et al, 2007). The typical finding from these studies is that distractors are rated more negatively than novel-baseline items, while ratings of targets do not differ from those of novelbaseline items (i.e., distractor devaluation, not target valuation).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive-behavioural and electrophysiological evidence of the affective consequences of ignoring stimulus representations in working memory

Vito¹,

Ferrey²,

Fenske³

et al. 2018

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Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items; a phenomenon attributed to the affective consequences of attentional inhibition. Here we investigated the generality of this ‘distractor devaluation’ phenomenon by asking whether ignoring stimuli represented internally within visual working memory has the same affective consequences. In two experiments we presented participants with two or three visual stimuli and then, after the stimuli were no longer visible, provided an attentional cue indicating which item in memory was the target they would have to later recall, and which were task-irrelevant distractors. Participants subsequently judged how much they liked these stimuli. Previously-ignored distractors were consistently rated less favorably than targets, replicating prior findings of distractor devaluation. To gain converging evidence, in Experiment 2, we also examined the electrophysiological processes associated with devaluation by measuring individual differences in attention (N2pc) and working memory (CDA) event-related potentials following the attention cue. Larger amplitude of an N2pc-like component was associated with greater devaluation, suggesting that individuals displaying more effective selection of memory targets—an act aided by distractor inhibition—displayed greater levels of distractor devaluation. Individuals showing a larger post-cue CDA amplitude (but not pre-cue CDA amplitude) also showed greater distractor devaluation, supporting prior evidence that visual working-memory resources have a functional role in effecting devaluation. Together, these findings demonstrate that ignoring working-memory representations has affective consequences, and add to the growing evidence that the contribution of selective-attention mechanisms to a wide range of human thought and behaviors leads to devaluation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive-behavioural and electrophysiological evidence of the affective consequences of ignoring stimulus representations in working memory

Vito¹,

Ferrey²,

Fenske³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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“…An individual is less likely to expend effort seeking a motivationally relevant stimulus, not because the ability to execute the necessary motor actions has been affected but because the stimulus itself has become less motivationally appealing. Several recent findings support this possible link between inhibition and stimulus devaluation, including the consistent observations that stimuli that are ignored or otherwise inhibited in selective attention (e.g., Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003;De Vito, Al-Aidroos, & Fenske, 2017;Fenske, Raymond, & Kunar, 2004;Fenske, Raymond, Kessler, Westoby, & Tipper, 2005;Kiss et al, 2007; or memory-suppression tasks Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou, & Bajo, 2016), or from which a response is withheld in go/no-go (e.g., Frischen, Ferrey, Burt, Pistchick, & Fenske, 2012;Ferrey et al, 2012;Kiss, Raymond, Westoby, Nobre, & Eimer, 2008) or stop-signal tasks (Wessel, Tonnesen, & Aron, 2015) subsequently receive more negative affective evaluations than the targets of attention/response. Such cognitive-behavioral and neuroimaging results have been taken as evidence that inhibition itself may alter the coding and representation of stimulus value (for reviews, see Fenske & Raymond, 2006;Raymond, 2009;.…”

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confidence: 82%

Less approach, more avoidance: Response inhibition has motivational consequences for sexual stimuli that reflect changes in affective value not a lingering global brake on behavior

2017

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Response inhibition negatively impacts subsequent hedonic evaluations of motivationally relevant stimuli and reduces the behavioral incentive to seek and obtain such items. Here we expand the investigation of the motivational consequences of inhibition by presenting sexually appealing and nonappealing images in a go/no-go task and a subsequent image-viewing task. Each initially obscured image in the viewing task could either be made more visible or less visible by repeatedly pressing different keys. Fewer key presses were made to obtain better views of preferred-sex images when such images had previously been inhibited as no-go items than when previously encountered as noninhibited go items. This finding replicates prior results and is consistent with the possibility that motor-response suppression has lingering effects that include global reductions in all behavioral expression. However, for nonpreferred images, prior inhibition resulted in more key presses to obscure their visibility than when such images had not been inhibited. This novel finding suggests that the motivational consequences of response inhibition are not due to a global brake on action but are instead linked to negative changes in stimulus value that induce corresponding increases in avoidance and decreases in approach.

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“…If the level of inhibition indicated by relatively slowed response times on ABA trials is indeed linked to the affective devaluation of the associated Mondrian images, then fluctuations in the magnitude of response-time slowing should be linked to the magnitude of stimulus devaluation. We assessed this using a modified version of the approach developed by Kiss et al (2007Kiss et al ( , 2008; see also Clancy, Fiacconi & Fenske, 2019;De Vito, Al-Aidroos & Fenske, 2017;Doallo et al, 2012) for investigating how neural and electrophysiological activity occurring during a task involving stimulus/response-inhibition can be predictive of subsequent affective ratings of the stimuli in that task. To examine whether fluctuations in the main behavioural index of backward inhibition-slowed response times-were linked to the magnitude of affective devaluation of ABA items, we first sorted all of the ABA sequences into two categories for each participant based on whether they gave the final-trial image from each sequence a relatively negative rating (i.e., Low-rating: bottom 40% of trials with lowest ratings) or a relatively positive rating (i.e., High-rating: top 40% of trials with highest ratings).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a wide range of cognitive domains in which inhibition-based processes are thought to be critical for successful performance, and evidence of a link between inhibition and negative stimulus-linked affect has been found in several of them. This includes devaluation of stimuli associated with behavioural inhibition in Go/No-go tasks (Fenske et al, 2005;Kiss et al, 2008;Veling, Holland, & Van Knipperberg, 2008) and Stop-signal tasks (Wessel & O'Doherty, 2014;Wessel, Tonnesen, & Aron, 2015), with attentional inhibition in visual search (Fenske et al, 2004;Raymond et al, 2005), flanker (Martiny-Huenger, , attentional blink (Kihara, Yagi, Takeda, & Kawahara, 2011) and distractor-avoidance tasks (De Vito, Al-Aidroos, & Fenske, 2017), with long-term memory suppression in Think/No-think (De Vito and and Directed-forgetting tasks (Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou, & Bajo, 2016;cf. Janczyk & Wühr, 2012) and with the inhibition of working memory representations in retro-cue memory-search tasks (De Vito & Fenske, 2018;De Vito, Ferrey, Fenske, & Al-Aidroos, 2018).…”

Section: Stimulus Devaluation By Backward Inhibition Exceeds Any Emotmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stimulus devaluation by backward inhibition exceeds any emotional impact of cognitive conflict: Evidence from task switching

Clancy¹,

Gillies²,

Fenske³

2020

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Ignoring or withholding a response from a stimulus causes it to become affectively devalued. Leading accounts posit that this is due to negative affect elicited by neurocognitive inhibition when it is applied to resolve conflict from distracting or otherwise inappropriate stimulus/response representations. Other research, however, suggests that stimulus/response conflict may itself elicit negative affect and devalue stimuli, raising questions about whether effects previously attributed to inhibition may instead reflect the emotional impact of conflict, per se. To address this, we measured affective ratings of art-like patterns that previously appeared on critical trials of a task-switching paradigm (ABA vs. CBA task sequences) known for its capacity to distinguish behavioural effects of inhibition and conflict. Stimuli from the ABA-sequence experimental condition showing behavioural evidence of backward inhibition (n-2 repetition costs) received more negative ratings than those from the CBA-sequence control condition. This stimulus-devaluation effect was not impacted by the level of conflict associated with high uncertainty or low uncertainty about upcoming task order. Moreover, the response-time index of inhibition was larger on ABA trials in which the associated stimuli later received negative ratings than on trials preceding relatively positive ratings. Inhibition therefore appears to have negative affective consequences that exceed any emotional impact of conflict, with fluctuations in inhibition linked to subsequent stimulus evaluations.

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Neural evidence that inhibition is linked to the affective devaluation of distractors that match the contents of working memory

Cited by 16 publications

References 50 publications

Cognitive-behavioural and electrophysiological evidence of the affective consequences of ignoring stimulus representations in working memory

Cognitive-behavioural and electrophysiological evidence of the affective consequences of ignoring stimulus representations in working memory

Less approach, more avoidance: Response inhibition has motivational consequences for sexual stimuli that reflect changes in affective value not a lingering global brake on behavior

Stimulus devaluation by backward inhibition exceeds any emotional impact of cognitive conflict: Evidence from task switching

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