The Cue-Approach Task as a General Mechanism for Long-Term Non-Reinforced Behavioral Change<strong></strong>

Abstract

Recent findings show that preferences for food items can be modified without externalreinforcements using the cue-approach task. In the task, the mere association of food item images with a neutral auditory cue and a speeded button press, resulted in enhanced preferences for the associated stimuli. Here, in a series of 10 independent samples with a total of 255 participants, we show we can enhance preferences using this non-reinforced method for faces, fractals and affective images as well as snack foods, using auditory, visual and even aversive cues. This change was highly durable in follow-up sessions performed one to six months after training. Preferences were successfully enhanced for all conditions, except for negative valence items. These findings promote our understanding of non-reinforced change, suggest a boundary condition for the effect and lay the foundation for development of novel applications. Peer-reviewed version available at Scientific Reports 2018, 8, 3614; doi:10.1038/s41598-018-21774-3 3 Behavioral change is an essential tool to improve health and quality of life, from treating addictions to eating and mood disorders [1][2][3] . Scientific research on behavioral change mainly focused on the effects of external reinforcements 2,[4][5][6][7] or altering the presentation of the decision problem [8][9][10] . Recently, the Cue-Approach Task (CAT) 11 was introduced as a successful method for enhancing preferences for food items, without external reinforcement, context change or selfcontrol. Here, we test multiple hypotheses that are aimed to shed light on this mechanism by studying its generalizability to multiple stimuli and cues, as well as the long-term durability of the effect.In the CAT, participants initially indicated their preferences for a set of snack-food items by specifying their willingness to pay for each item in an auction procedure. Then, in the cueapproach training, some of the items were consistently associated with a neutral auditory cue and a speeded button press response (these stimuli were termed 'Go items'), whereas other stimuli were presented without a cue ('No-Go items'). In the following probe phase, participants were asked to choose a snack they would like to eat at the end of the experiment. Each probe-choice comprised of a pair of items with similar initial values, in which one of the two snacks was a Go item. Results showed that the mere association of snack-food images with a neutral auditory cue and a speeded button press, resulted in enhanced preferences for Go items over No-Go items. This preference change effect varied across different value categories -resulting in enhanced preferences for snack-food items of initial high-value, yet significantly less prominent change in preferences for low-value items. The effect was maintained two-months following training 11 .Additional studies with CAT 12 found that for the behavioral change to take place, cue-approach training required the presence of both a speeded button press response and a cue; i.e. CAT ha...

Spacing of Cue-approach Training Leads to Better Maintenance of Behavioral Change

“…Previous research aimed at changing choice preferences for appetitive foods employed a novel 18 non-reinforced training paradigm named "cue-approach training" [CAT, 3]. Cue-approach training 19was found to be effective at influencing choice behavior in an immediate test [3][4][5][6][7] and the choice 20 preference shift was shown to persist over at least two months after the longest cue-approach 21 SPACING OF CUE-APPROACH TRAINING 3 training employed [3,8]. The cue-approach task is related to previous work showing that visual 22 attention both reflects and influences choices [9][10][11] and to other research on the attentional boost 23 effect that highlights the importance of driving attention at behaviorally relevant points in time in 24 boosting memory for incidental stimuli [12][13][14].…”

“…These stimuli were used in 162 previous studies [3,23]. The snacks for sample 4 were of Israeli snacks and can be found in 163 schonberglab.tau.ac.il/resources and were previously used [8]. The auction procedure ( Fig 1A) was described in detail in previous publications [3][4][5] and 167 followed the procedure of a Becker-Degroot-Marschak (BDM) auction [24].…”