Title: Exploring the effects of learning and motivation on visual cognition
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: To maintain a healthy lifestyle, people need to be able to choose healthy options even when surrounded by tempting alternatives. For example, someone may plan to lose weight, but when an advertisement for pizza is suddenly noticed, his or her motivation to eat may rise sharply, overriding a previous priority to diet. This is because the state of mind that drives a person to make certain choices can arise suddenly and be initiated simply by exposure to objects and information. These stimuli are called incentive cues and they acquire their power to spontaneously motivate behaviour through learning. Such stimuli are also effective at catching our eye and filling our thoughts, sometimes making it difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. The aim of our project is to investigate how incentive cues affect perception and cognition because these critical processes are precursors to behavioural choice. Inappropriate choice in response to incentive cues is thought to be a leading cause of binge eating/drinking, relapse from abstinence in recovering drug addicts, and why some people, especially adolescents, engage in impulsive, risky behaviour. On the other hand, in multi-tasking situations, incentive cues can be helpful because they allow people to rapidly respond in optimal ways to new scenarios. This project will help identify how and when incentive cues help and hurt performance in visual cognition tasks. Our interest in this topic stems from our recent work showing that incentive cues can be highly effective at gaining momentary, exclusive access to the brain's visual cognition network. It is well established that the visual cognition network is severely limited in capacity and requires a selection mechanism so that only the most relevant information is processed. Visual selection appear to work by a process of competition, with the brain supplying biases favouring the processing of one stimulus over another. We hypothesise that incentive cues activate two different types of processing bias, one based on subjective value and the other based on arousal. We think these biases help incentive cues gain control over visual cognition at different stages. The project will test our hypotheses in three series of experiments on healthy young adults and a fourth series involving teenagers (a PhD project). We will also test the idea that people who are especially likely to be distracted and motivated inappropriately by incentive cues will show an unusually strong propensity to visually orient to cues during learning. If so, behaviour during learning could be used as an indicator of risk for problems in controlling motivation (as in impulsivity). In our experiments participants will learn to associate modest monetary rewards and punishers with different visual objects so that those objects can later act as incentive (or disincentive) cues. Then, participants will perform simple visual tasks involving these cues. We predict that performance on different tasks will be depend on whether cues are high versus low in arousal value or are high versus low in subjective value. We will also monitor visual orienting (eye movements) during learning to explore individual differences and also record the electroencephalogram (EEG) during engagement with visual tasks so that we can test our predictions that biases act at different times and in different ways during visual processing. The work conducted in this project will develop understanding of how learning and motivation influence visual attention and visual short-term memory. Importantly, the project is set within a well-developed neurobiological framework, so that findings will be relevant to theories of how brain mechanisms underlying reward learning interact with attention and memory. This advance in understanding will provide a crucial piece of the puzzle concerning how motivational disorders (e.g., addiction, overeating) occur and provide insight into how they might be treated.


Research activity codes: 1.1 NORMAL BIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT AND FUNCTIONING;1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH;NEUROLOGICAL