The salience of a reward cue can outlast reward devaluation.

Abstract

Reward cues can be perceived as highly attractive stimuli because of their acquired motivational properties. However, because the motivational value of reward changes after reward receipt, a debated question is whether the attentional salience of reward cues changes accordingly. In Experiment 1, thirsty participants learned 3 cue-reward associations involving different contingencies. Then, while thirsty, participants performed a visual-search task under extinction, during which the previous reward cues appeared as irrelevant stimuli containing target and distractor items. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that participants drank ad libitum before the visual-search task. In Experiment 3, instead, participants quenched their thirst at the beginning of the learning session. The results of Experiment 1 showed that attention was preferentially deployed toward the cue that best predicted the reward in the previous conditioning phase. Crucially, Experiment 2 revealed that the attentional bias persisted despite reward devaluation. By contrast, no attentional bias was found in Experiment 3. The novelty of our study is that the attentional salience of a reward cue can outlast reward devaluation, suggesting that some incentive properties of the cue can become independent from those of the reward. (PsycINFO Database Record

Evidence of structure and persistence in motivational attraction to serial Pavlovian cues

“…However, signtracking to a reward-proximal lever is unaffected by the presence of a reward-distal lever preceding it. Sign-tracking to a single proximal cue is also insensitive to outcome devaluation, consistent with prior reports (Morrison et al 2015;Nasser et al 2015;De Tommaso et al 2017). Remarkably, while rats with a single cue continue to sign-track but reject the rewards received, rats with serial cues continue to respond and continue to consume the reward as evidence of a contextual limit to the devaluation that they had acquired (see Discussion).…”

“…Further, animals that have a tendency toward sign-tracking are more likely to continue responding after outcome devaluation while both sign-and goaltracking animals respond equally to audio or visual second order stimuli to lever cues (Nasser et al 2015). In humans, cues that previously predicted a liquid reward were devalued by quenching participants thirst then tested among distractor stimuli and are shown to continue to demand attention from participants and are considered outcome insensitive (De Tommaso et al 2017). Our results in the solitary cue condition in Experiments 1 and 2 essentially replicate these findings; animals in this group did not alter their sign-tracking response after reward devaluation either in extinction or reacquisition sessions, despite maintaining an aversion to the reward (reflected in minimal consumption during reacquisition and in the subsequent free-feeding test, as well as avoiding the food cup).…”

“…Commonly, outcome insensitivity in a behavioral response is interpreted as reflecting an underlying habitual stimulus-response association (Dickinson 1985;Balleine and Dickinson 1998). However, given that sign-tracking can exhibit non-habit-like characteristics-it can change flexibly in its response details after an omission criterion is imposed (Chang and Smith 2016) and it can emerge spontaneously in a novel appetite state )-an alternative interpretation is also worth considering that the response reflects a dissociation of the motivational value of the cue from the value of the reward itself, with cue valuation thus being resistant to change when reward value changes (Robinson and Berridge 2008;De Tommaso et al 2017). Regardless, the sign-tracking response to a single cue, as well as serial cues, is notably rigid.…”

“…A common one is approach to a reward when its availability is indicated by a cue. When cues are discrete and localizable, motivated behavior often can also be directed to the cue itself (Brown and Jenkins 1968;De Tommaso et al 2017). This behavior, also known as signtracking, is thought to reflect in part the attribution of incentive value to the cue by virtue of its pairing with reward (Berridge 2004;Flagel and Robinson 2017).…”

“…This is particularly true when a manipulable cue, like the insertion of a lever, is used. Curious features of sign-tracking to levers are that it is resistant to associative blocking by other stimuli (Holland et al 2014), is partly persistent in the face of reward omission when it occurs (Chang and Smith 2016), and is insensitive to devaluation of the outcome (Morrison et al 2015;De Tommaso et al 2017) while also being immediately sensitive to new appetite states relevant to the outcome . It is thus difficult to derive predictions about sign-tracking to serial lever cues: would motivated responding be biased toward one cue or be equivalent?…”