Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emergi... more Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emerging evidence suggests that attention may mediate such acts, but little is known about the specific operations through which attention might influence self-regulation. Here we test this often-implicit assumption by manipulating attention mechanisms in two ways: one controlling the inhibition of inappropriate responses; the other controlling the breadth of attention. Participants significantly improved their performance on a self-regulation task after practice on a response inhibition task (Experiment 1) and after the induction of a broad focus of attention in a visual discrimination task (Experiment 2). We propose that such manipulations enhance self-regulation by engaging mechanisms that enhance the salience of goal-related representations and reduce the activation of competing goal-irrelevant neural representations. By more efficiently resolving conflict among the signals vying to drive behavior, pre-engaging attention may also help to conserve resources needed for continued self-regulation.
Response inhibition negatively impacts the emotional and motivational significance of associated ... more Response inhibition negatively impacts the emotional and motivational significance of associated stimuli. Current accounts question whether this stimulus devaluation effect occurs immediately via negative affect elicited by inhibition, or only occurs later via a misattribution of decreased fluency as unpleasantness in the context of an explicit affective-evaluation task. Using facial electromyography, we recorded indirect physiological markers of affective response during a response-inhibition (Go/No-go) task to test opposing predictions arising from the immediate-affect and delayed-misattribution hypotheses. Engagement of the corrugator supercilli-a muscle closely associated with negative affect-was greater during periods when response inhibition was applied (No-go trials) than when not applied (Go trials). Moreover, corrugator engagement during response-inhibition predicted the magnitude of stimulus devaluation measured behaviorally in subsequent subjective ratings (How cheerful?), with greater engagement during No-go trials that contained abstract-art stimuli later rated negatively than during trials that contained items later rated positively. These results support the immediate-affect hypothesis and converge with prior neuroimaging evidence to suggest that the negative impact of inhibition promptly alters the coding of stimulus value. In contrast, none of the delayed-misattribution based predictions were confirmed.
ABSTRACT—Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of atte... more ABSTRACT—Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can influence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stopsignal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as ‘‘more trustworthy’ ’ and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as ‘‘less trustworthy.’’ For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is ‘‘on a lighter background’’ vs. ‘‘on a darker background’’). These results suggest that attentional inhibition ...
Social-emotional evaluations of unfamiliar people are negatively impacted by ignoring or withhold... more Social-emotional evaluations of unfamiliar people are negatively impacted by ignoring or withholding motor-responses from images that depict them; an effect attributed to the propensity of inhibition to affectively devalue associated stimuli. Prior findings suggest that the social-emotional consequences of inhibition may be mediated by category-level representations that impact all members of a corresponding group. Here we assess whether social devaluation by inhibition also operates on item-level representations of specific individuals. Participants memorized individual identities of a group of fellow students before completing a Go/No-go response-inhibition task designed to associate item-level representations of each previously-memorized person with inhibition (No-go trials) or no inhibition (Go trials). Social identities associated with inhibition were consistently rated as less trustworthy in subsequent evaluations than those associated with Go trials that were not inhibited. T...
Ignoring or withholding a response from a stimulus causes it to become affectively devalued. Lead... more 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...
Changes in mood can influence the allocation of attention. Positive affect, for example, is often... more Changes in mood can influence the allocation of attention. Positive affect, for example, is often associated with a broadening of attention, whereas negative affect is often associated with a narrowing of attention. Here we examine whether the link between mood and visuospatial attention also works in the opposite direction. Can changes in the breadth of attention affect subsequent mood? We assessed mood both before and after a global/local visual-perception task that required participants to adopt a relatively broad, neutral, or narrow attentional focus. We found that the Broad-focus task resulted in mood ratings that were higher in both affective valence and arousal than those following the Narrow-focus task and Neutral-focus task. These results build on prior findings to show that changes in the focus of attention can have affective consequences that include altered valence and arousal.
The motivational incentive of sexual stimuli can be a salient force in determining the focus of t... more The motivational incentive of sexual stimuli can be a salient force in determining the focus of thought and behaviour. Here we show that the simple act of not pressing a key during the perception of sexual content reduces its motivational incentive and subsequent capacity to elicit sexual arousal. Undergraduate participants (N=116) completed a Go/No-go task that required them to inhibit responses to either sexual or non-sexual images. Later they watched sexually explicit videos and reported moment-to-moment changes in self-reported sexual arousal, while thermography was used to record changes in genital physiological arousal. Participants who previously inhibited sexual images experienced lower levels of both self-reported and physiological arousal than those who inhibited non-sexual images. These results extend prior research to suggest that a by-product of motor-response inhibition is a negative alteration of stimulus-value representations for associated items— the kind of value t...
Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items; a p... more 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 m...
Prolonged sitting, common in many workplaces, reduces blood flow to the lower limb and has negati... more Prolonged sitting, common in many workplaces, reduces blood flow to the lower limb and has negative health outcomes. CoreChair is an active-sitting chair that encourages increased movement to help mitigate these outcomes. Physiological and cognitive measures were recorded in ten participants over four hours of sitting in both the CoreChair and a traditional office chair. Sitting in both chairs led to increases in calf circumference (p<0.0001), reduced tactile sensitivity (p=0.02), and a cognitive decline in attention (p=0.035) over time. However, the increase in calf circumference was smaller in the CoreChair at the second (p= 0.017) and third hour (p= 0.012) compared to the traditional chair. Additionally, for the attention task, the traditional chair generated more attention-task errors (p=0.005), while no changes were observed with the CoreChair (p=0.13). These findings suggest that during prolonged sitting CoreChair may have modest physiological and cognitive benefits compared to a traditional chair.
The multiple state theory of working memory suggests that representations are divided into two st... more The multiple state theory of working memory suggests that representations are divided into two states: a focused-on active representation and accessory memories held for later use. Here, we tested two competing hypotheses regarding the neurocognitive mechanisms responsible for this separation: (1) that accessory memories undergo inhibition or (2) that accessory memories are amplified less than active representations. We explored if accessory memories undergo affective devaluation, a known index of the involvement of inhibition in a visual task. On each trial participants memorized four items, were cued to focus on one, and then completed a visual search or an affective evaluation task. While search distractors matching the colour of an active item slowed search, those matching an accessory memory did not, replicating previous findings that only active items guide search. Also, accessory items were affectively devalued compared to baseline and active items, supporting the hypothesis ...
Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, Jan 15, 2018
Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items, a p... more 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 devalu...
Response inhibition negatively impacts subsequent hedonic evaluations of motivationally relevant ... more 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. Keywords Inhibition. Stimulus value. Affective evaluation. Behavioral motivation Anyone who has crossed a busy street when rushing late to an appointment can appreciate the adaptive value of suppressing a
Stimuli appearing as visual distractors subsequently receive more negative affective evaluations ... more Stimuli appearing as visual distractors subsequently receive more negative affective evaluations than novel items or prior targets of attention. Leading accounts question whether this distractor devaluation effect occurs through evaluative codes that become associated with distractors as a mere artefact of attention-task instructions, or through affective consequences of attentional inhibition when applied to prevent distractor interference. Here we test opposing predictions arising from the evaluative-coding and devaluation-by-inhibition hypotheses using an electrophysiological marker of attentional inhibition in a task that requires participants to avoid interference from abstract-shape distractors presented while maintaining a uniquely-colored stimulus in memory. Consistent with prior research, distractors that matched the colour of the stimulus being held in memory elicited a Pd component of the event-related potential waveform, indicating that their processing was being activel...
Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be in... more Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be inhibited to prevent interference with goal-directed behaviour. Growing evidence suggests that the impact of inhibition is not limited to reduced neurocognitive processing, but also includes negative affective consequences for any associated stimuli. The link between inhibition and aversive response has primarily been studied using tasks involving attentional- or response-related inhibition of external sensory stimuli. Here we show that affective devaluation also occurs when inhibition is applied to fully-encoded stimulus representations in memory. We first replicated prior findings of increased forgetting of words whose memories were suppressed in a Think/No-think procedure (Experiment 1). Incorporating a stimulus-evaluation task within this procedure revealed that suppressing memories of words (Experiment 2) and visual objects (Experiment 3) also results in their affective devaluation. G...
Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processe... more Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processes that occur during an instance of boredom. Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom, we argue that boredom is universally conceptualized as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.” We propose to map this conceptualization onto underlying mental processes. Specifically, we propose that boredom be defined in terms of attention. That is, boredom is the aversive state that occurs when we (a) are not able to successfully engage attention with internal (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external (e.g., environmental stimuli) information required for participating in satisfying activity, (b) are focused on the fact that we are not able to engage attention and participate in satisfying activity, and (c) attribute the cause of our aversive state to the environment. We believe that our definition ...
Abstract Complex abstract images that are ignored in a simple localization task are subsequently ... more Abstract Complex abstract images that are ignored in a simple localization task are subsequently judged more negatively in an emotional evaluation task than previously unseen or attended images, suggesting that attentional inhibition may have affective consequences (Raymond, Fenske, &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Tavassoli, in press). We examined the generality of this finding by asking whether inhibitory processes might also influence the generation of emotional responses to unfamiliar faces. To do this, we incorporated an emotional ...
The motivational incentive of reward-related stimuli can become so salient that it drives behavio... more The motivational incentive of reward-related stimuli can become so salient that it drives behavior at the cost of other needs. Here we show that response inhibition applied during a Go/No-go task not only impacts hedonic evaluations but also reduces the behavioral incentive of motivationally relevant stimuli. We first examined the impact of response inhibition on the hedonic value of sex stimuli associated with strong behavioral-approach responses (Experiment 1). Sexually appealing and non-appealing images were both rated as less attractive when previously encountered as No-go (inhibited) than as Go (non-inhibited) items. We then discovered that inhibition reduces the motivational incentive of sexual appealing stimuli (Experiment 2). Prior Go/No-go status affected the number of key-presses by heterosexual males to view erotic-female (sexually appealing) but not erotic-male or scrambled-control (non-appealing) images. These findings may provide a foundation for developing inhibition-based interventions to reduce the hedonic value and motivational incentive of stimuli associated with disorders of self-control.
Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emergi... more Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emerging evidence suggests that attention may mediate such acts, but little is known about the specific operations through which attention might influence self-regulation. Here we test this often-implicit assumption by manipulating attention mechanisms in two ways: one controlling the inhibition of inappropriate responses; the other controlling the breadth of attention. Participants significantly improved their performance on a self-regulation task after practice on a response inhibition task (Experiment 1) and after the induction of a broad focus of attention in a visual discrimination task (Experiment 2). We propose that such manipulations enhance self-regulation by engaging mechanisms that enhance the salience of goal-related representations and reduce the activation of competing goal-irrelevant neural representations. By more efficiently resolving conflict among the signals vying to drive behavior, pre-engaging attention may also help to conserve resources needed for continued self-regulation.
Response inhibition negatively impacts the emotional and motivational significance of associated ... more Response inhibition negatively impacts the emotional and motivational significance of associated stimuli. Current accounts question whether this stimulus devaluation effect occurs immediately via negative affect elicited by inhibition, or only occurs later via a misattribution of decreased fluency as unpleasantness in the context of an explicit affective-evaluation task. Using facial electromyography, we recorded indirect physiological markers of affective response during a response-inhibition (Go/No-go) task to test opposing predictions arising from the immediate-affect and delayed-misattribution hypotheses. Engagement of the corrugator supercilli-a muscle closely associated with negative affect-was greater during periods when response inhibition was applied (No-go trials) than when not applied (Go trials). Moreover, corrugator engagement during response-inhibition predicted the magnitude of stimulus devaluation measured behaviorally in subsequent subjective ratings (How cheerful?), with greater engagement during No-go trials that contained abstract-art stimuli later rated negatively than during trials that contained items later rated positively. These results support the immediate-affect hypothesis and converge with prior neuroimaging evidence to suggest that the negative impact of inhibition promptly alters the coding of stimulus value. In contrast, none of the delayed-misattribution based predictions were confirmed.
ABSTRACT—Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of atte... more ABSTRACT—Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can influence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stopsignal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as ‘‘more trustworthy’ ’ and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as ‘‘less trustworthy.’’ For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is ‘‘on a lighter background’’ vs. ‘‘on a darker background’’). These results suggest that attentional inhibition ...
Social-emotional evaluations of unfamiliar people are negatively impacted by ignoring or withhold... more Social-emotional evaluations of unfamiliar people are negatively impacted by ignoring or withholding motor-responses from images that depict them; an effect attributed to the propensity of inhibition to affectively devalue associated stimuli. Prior findings suggest that the social-emotional consequences of inhibition may be mediated by category-level representations that impact all members of a corresponding group. Here we assess whether social devaluation by inhibition also operates on item-level representations of specific individuals. Participants memorized individual identities of a group of fellow students before completing a Go/No-go response-inhibition task designed to associate item-level representations of each previously-memorized person with inhibition (No-go trials) or no inhibition (Go trials). Social identities associated with inhibition were consistently rated as less trustworthy in subsequent evaluations than those associated with Go trials that were not inhibited. T...
Ignoring or withholding a response from a stimulus causes it to become affectively devalued. Lead... more 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...
Changes in mood can influence the allocation of attention. Positive affect, for example, is often... more Changes in mood can influence the allocation of attention. Positive affect, for example, is often associated with a broadening of attention, whereas negative affect is often associated with a narrowing of attention. Here we examine whether the link between mood and visuospatial attention also works in the opposite direction. Can changes in the breadth of attention affect subsequent mood? We assessed mood both before and after a global/local visual-perception task that required participants to adopt a relatively broad, neutral, or narrow attentional focus. We found that the Broad-focus task resulted in mood ratings that were higher in both affective valence and arousal than those following the Narrow-focus task and Neutral-focus task. These results build on prior findings to show that changes in the focus of attention can have affective consequences that include altered valence and arousal.
The motivational incentive of sexual stimuli can be a salient force in determining the focus of t... more The motivational incentive of sexual stimuli can be a salient force in determining the focus of thought and behaviour. Here we show that the simple act of not pressing a key during the perception of sexual content reduces its motivational incentive and subsequent capacity to elicit sexual arousal. Undergraduate participants (N=116) completed a Go/No-go task that required them to inhibit responses to either sexual or non-sexual images. Later they watched sexually explicit videos and reported moment-to-moment changes in self-reported sexual arousal, while thermography was used to record changes in genital physiological arousal. Participants who previously inhibited sexual images experienced lower levels of both self-reported and physiological arousal than those who inhibited non-sexual images. These results extend prior research to suggest that a by-product of motor-response inhibition is a negative alteration of stimulus-value representations for associated items— the kind of value t...
Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items; a p... more 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 m...
Prolonged sitting, common in many workplaces, reduces blood flow to the lower limb and has negati... more Prolonged sitting, common in many workplaces, reduces blood flow to the lower limb and has negative health outcomes. CoreChair is an active-sitting chair that encourages increased movement to help mitigate these outcomes. Physiological and cognitive measures were recorded in ten participants over four hours of sitting in both the CoreChair and a traditional office chair. Sitting in both chairs led to increases in calf circumference (p<0.0001), reduced tactile sensitivity (p=0.02), and a cognitive decline in attention (p=0.035) over time. However, the increase in calf circumference was smaller in the CoreChair at the second (p= 0.017) and third hour (p= 0.012) compared to the traditional chair. Additionally, for the attention task, the traditional chair generated more attention-task errors (p=0.005), while no changes were observed with the CoreChair (p=0.13). These findings suggest that during prolonged sitting CoreChair may have modest physiological and cognitive benefits compared to a traditional chair.
The multiple state theory of working memory suggests that representations are divided into two st... more The multiple state theory of working memory suggests that representations are divided into two states: a focused-on active representation and accessory memories held for later use. Here, we tested two competing hypotheses regarding the neurocognitive mechanisms responsible for this separation: (1) that accessory memories undergo inhibition or (2) that accessory memories are amplified less than active representations. We explored if accessory memories undergo affective devaluation, a known index of the involvement of inhibition in a visual task. On each trial participants memorized four items, were cued to focus on one, and then completed a visual search or an affective evaluation task. While search distractors matching the colour of an active item slowed search, those matching an accessory memory did not, replicating previous findings that only active items guide search. Also, accessory items were affectively devalued compared to baseline and active items, supporting the hypothesis ...
Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, Jan 15, 2018
Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items, a p... more 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 devalu...
Response inhibition negatively impacts subsequent hedonic evaluations of motivationally relevant ... more 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. Keywords Inhibition. Stimulus value. Affective evaluation. Behavioral motivation Anyone who has crossed a busy street when rushing late to an appointment can appreciate the adaptive value of suppressing a
Stimuli appearing as visual distractors subsequently receive more negative affective evaluations ... more Stimuli appearing as visual distractors subsequently receive more negative affective evaluations than novel items or prior targets of attention. Leading accounts question whether this distractor devaluation effect occurs through evaluative codes that become associated with distractors as a mere artefact of attention-task instructions, or through affective consequences of attentional inhibition when applied to prevent distractor interference. Here we test opposing predictions arising from the evaluative-coding and devaluation-by-inhibition hypotheses using an electrophysiological marker of attentional inhibition in a task that requires participants to avoid interference from abstract-shape distractors presented while maintaining a uniquely-colored stimulus in memory. Consistent with prior research, distractors that matched the colour of the stimulus being held in memory elicited a Pd component of the event-related potential waveform, indicating that their processing was being activel...
Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be in... more Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be inhibited to prevent interference with goal-directed behaviour. Growing evidence suggests that the impact of inhibition is not limited to reduced neurocognitive processing, but also includes negative affective consequences for any associated stimuli. The link between inhibition and aversive response has primarily been studied using tasks involving attentional- or response-related inhibition of external sensory stimuli. Here we show that affective devaluation also occurs when inhibition is applied to fully-encoded stimulus representations in memory. We first replicated prior findings of increased forgetting of words whose memories were suppressed in a Think/No-think procedure (Experiment 1). Incorporating a stimulus-evaluation task within this procedure revealed that suppressing memories of words (Experiment 2) and visual objects (Experiment 3) also results in their affective devaluation. G...
Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processe... more Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processes that occur during an instance of boredom. Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom, we argue that boredom is universally conceptualized as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.” We propose to map this conceptualization onto underlying mental processes. Specifically, we propose that boredom be defined in terms of attention. That is, boredom is the aversive state that occurs when we (a) are not able to successfully engage attention with internal (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external (e.g., environmental stimuli) information required for participating in satisfying activity, (b) are focused on the fact that we are not able to engage attention and participate in satisfying activity, and (c) attribute the cause of our aversive state to the environment. We believe that our definition ...
Abstract Complex abstract images that are ignored in a simple localization task are subsequently ... more Abstract Complex abstract images that are ignored in a simple localization task are subsequently judged more negatively in an emotional evaluation task than previously unseen or attended images, suggesting that attentional inhibition may have affective consequences (Raymond, Fenske, &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Tavassoli, in press). We examined the generality of this finding by asking whether inhibitory processes might also influence the generation of emotional responses to unfamiliar faces. To do this, we incorporated an emotional ...
The motivational incentive of reward-related stimuli can become so salient that it drives behavio... more The motivational incentive of reward-related stimuli can become so salient that it drives behavior at the cost of other needs. Here we show that response inhibition applied during a Go/No-go task not only impacts hedonic evaluations but also reduces the behavioral incentive of motivationally relevant stimuli. We first examined the impact of response inhibition on the hedonic value of sex stimuli associated with strong behavioral-approach responses (Experiment 1). Sexually appealing and non-appealing images were both rated as less attractive when previously encountered as No-go (inhibited) than as Go (non-inhibited) items. We then discovered that inhibition reduces the motivational incentive of sexual appealing stimuli (Experiment 2). Prior Go/No-go status affected the number of key-presses by heterosexual males to view erotic-female (sexually appealing) but not erotic-male or scrambled-control (non-appealing) images. These findings may provide a foundation for developing inhibition-based interventions to reduce the hedonic value and motivational incentive of stimuli associated with disorders of self-control.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their prod-ucts are cla... more Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their prod-ucts are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Da Capo Press was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters. ...
Abstract When an emotionally charged prime stimulus (eg a happy or angry face) is presented immed... more Abstract When an emotionally charged prime stimulus (eg a happy or angry face) is presented immediately prior to and at the same location as a target stimulus (eg a novel abstract image), affective evaluation of the target is typically biased in the direction of the prime&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;s valence. Conventional theories of the affective priming (AP) effect posit that primes initiate a general affective state that &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;spreads&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27; to any other stimuli presented immediately thereafter (SOA up to approximately 300 ms). An alternative view, more in line with object- ...
Search all the public and authenticated articles in CiteULike. Include unauthenticated results to... more Search all the public and authenticated articles in CiteULike. Include unauthenticated results too (may include "spam") Enter a search phrase. You can also specify a CiteULike article id (123456),. a DOI (doi:10.1234/12345678). or a PubMed ID (pmid:12345678). Click Help for advanced usage. CiteULike, Group: ilyajune, Search, Register, Log in, ...
Abstract Although the attentional processes mediating visual search are well-studied, little is k... more Abstract Although the attentional processes mediating visual search are well-studied, little is known about how or whether these processes modulate affective evaluation of recently searched stimuli. Our previous research showed that stimuli are affectively devalued when initially encountered as distractors in a simple two-item localization task compared to stimuli seen as targets, perhaps due to attentional inhibition of stimuli that compete for control over responding. Here we sought to determine if this devaluation effect would still be evident ...
Abstract The term priming typically denotes a behavioral change (usually an improvement) in the s... more Abstract The term priming typically denotes a behavioral change (usually an improvement) in the speed or ability to identify a stimulus following a prior exposure to the same, or a related, stimulus. Experience-based facilitation of object recognition is also achieved through context-specific expectations about which objects are likely to appear together in a specific scene. Seeing a computer mouse, for instance, can facilitate subsequent recognition of contextually related objects such as a keyboard and a monitor. The benefit of prior ...
Abstract In visual attention tasks, stimuli that must be ignored or otherwise inhibited for accur... more Abstract In visual attention tasks, stimuli that must be ignored or otherwise inhibited for accurate performance subsequently receive more negative evaluations than novel stimuli or those seen as the targets of attention (eg, Raymond, Fenske &amp;amp;amp; Tavassoli, 2003). Such distractor devaluation effects have been taken as evidence that the application of attentional inhibition has negative affective consequences for visual stimuli (Fenske &amp;amp;amp; Raymond, 2006). This view predicts that inhibited stimuli should be rated more negatively regardless of their ...
Ignoring a visual stimulus causes it to subsequently receive more negative affective ratings than... more Ignoring a visual stimulus causes it to subsequently receive more negative affective ratings than novel items or prior targets of attention. This has been taken as evidence that attentional inhibition alters the coding of stimulus-associated value to ensure that previously distracting stimuli can be effectively avoided in future encounters. Previous results have suggested that this &amp;amp;#39;inhibitory devaluation&amp;amp;#39; effect may operate through affective associations with specific perceptual features that allow distractors to be differentiated from targets. Prior inhibition can thereby impact the affective value both of specific items that have appeared as distractors and of novel items that share a previously ignored feature. But what happens when a distractor shares the same perceptual features as a target being held in visual working memory? Recent electrophysiological evidence suggests that while the similarity may initially cause selective attention to be biased toward such task-irrelevant items, active inhibition may then be triggered to prevent them from interfering with the ongoing task. If inhibition causes affective devaluation, then such findings predict greater devaluation of task-irrelevant stimuli that share the same perceptual features as a target being held in visual working memory than those that do not. To test this, we utilized delayed-match-to-sample trials that required participants to maintain a uniquely-coloured stimulus in working memory while task-irrelevant probe arrays were presented. The probe arrays contained abstract shapes whose colour either matched or did not match that of the stimulus being held in memory. Subsequent affective-evaluation trials revealed that prior memory-matching distractors received more negative ratings than non-matching distractors or a set of previously-unseen shapes. These results converge with prior electrophysiological evidence to suggest that distractors matching the contents of visual working memory are subjected to greater levels of attentional inhibition than other task-irrelevant stimuli, and that the consequences of this inhibition include alterations in affective value. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.
Abstract We see the world in scenes. In spite of the infinitely diverse appearance of these scene... more Abstract We see the world in scenes. In spite of the infinitely diverse appearance of these scenes, they typically include contextual associations that make the identity of the objects therein highly predictable. Such associations can give rise to context-based expectations that might benefit recognition of objects within the same setting. For example, seeing a fork will facilitate the recognition of contextually related objects such as a knife and a plate. Building on previous work (Bar, 2003; Bar &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Aminoff, 2003), we propose a mechanism for ...
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