Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

Abstract

a b s t r a c tSome stimuli can orient attentional resources and access awareness even if they appear outside the focus of voluntary attention. Stimuli with low-level perceptual salience and stimuli with an emotional content can modulate attention independently of voluntary processes. In Experiment 1, we used a spatial cuing task to investigate whether stimuli that are controlled for their perceptual salience can modulate the rapid orienting of attention based exclusively on their affective relevance. Affective relevance was manipulated through a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm in which an arbitrary and affectively neutral perceptual stimulus was associated with a primary reward (i.e., a chocolate odor). Results revealed that, after conditioning, attentional resources were rapidly oriented toward the stimulus that was previously associated with the reward. In Experiment 2, we used the very same conditioning procedure, but we devaluated the reward after conditioning for half of the participants through a sensory-specific satiation procedure. Strikingly, when the reward was devaluated, attention was no longer oriented toward reward-associated stimuli. Our findings therefore suggest that reward associations rapidly modulate visual processing independently of both voluntary processing and the perceptual salience of the stimulus. This supports the notion that stimuli associated with primary rewards modulate rapid attention orienting on the basis of the affective relevance of the stimulus.

Stress increases cue-triggered “wanting” for sweet reward in humans.

“…Analogous Pavlovian conditioning. The procedure that we previously elaborated (Pool et al, 2014) was applied here. Briefly, three initially neutral images were attributed the Pavlovian roles of "baseline," "CSϩ," and "CSϪ."…”

“…The Pavlovian stimuli consisted of three geometric complex figures typically used in human conditioning paradigms (Gottfried, O'Doherty, & Dolan, 2003;O'Doherty et al, 2004;Valentin, Dickinson, & O'Doherty, 2007) that in a pilot study (n ϭ 26) were rated as similarly neutral on a pleasantness scale (see Pool et al, 2014). They were displayed in the center of the computer screen with a visual angle of 8°.…”

“…We used an analog of a PIT adapted to a human population (Talmi, Seymour, Dayan, & Dolan, 2008): During instrumental conditioning, an instrumental action (i.e., pressing a handgrip) was associated with chocolate odor (unconditioned stimulus, US). During an analog of a Pavlovian conditioning task geometric figures were associated with the presence (CSϩ) or absence (CSϪ and baseline) of chocolate odor (see Pool, Brosch, Delplanque, & Sander, 2014), and during the transfer test, the effort mobilized on the handgrip was measured during the presentation of the Pavlovian stimuli (CSϩ, CSϪ, and baseline). After the instrumental and the analogous Pavlovian conditioning but before the transfer test, participants underwent either a stress-inducing task or a control stress-free task (Schwabe, Haddad, & Schachinger, 2008).…”

Attentional bias for positive emotional stimuli: A meta-analytic investigation.

“…Like exogenous attention, emotional attention is rapid and involuntary; it is also comparable to endogenous attention, however, as it strongly depends on some of the observer's internal factors, such as the affective state (e.g., a state of anxiety; Bar-Haim et al, 2007). Some investigators have proposed that exogenous attention, endogenous attention, and emotional attention have an additive influence on attentional selection (Brosch et al, 2011), thereby suggesting that these three systems can operate simultaneously and that they each have a unique influence on attention (Pourtois et al, 2013). Moreover, emotional attention has been shown to be particularly mediated by a neuronal structure (i.e., the amygdala) that differs from the structures that mediate exogenous and endogenous attention (Vuilleumier, 2005;Vuilleumier & Brosch, 2009).…”

“…These two subcomponents of attentional biases are dissociable processes that can be differentially manipulated (Born, Kerzel, & Theeuwes, 2011). Recent studies (Pool, Brosch, Delplanque, & Sander, 2014;Theeuwes & Belopolsky, 2012) parsing the contribution of these two subcomponents in attentional bias for positive stimuli suggested that the bias is driven by an initial orienting more than a difficulty in disengaging attention. In the present meta-analysis, a moderator was coded on the subcomponent of attentional bias (initial orienting or difficulty in disengagement) when the experimental paradigm used in the study allowed such a distinction.…”