news 2022 spence award mini episode: dr brian anderson and habit-reinforcing behavior june 24 2022 2022 spence award mini episode: dr brian anderson and habit-reinforcing behavior dr brian anderson winner of the 2022 aps janet taylor spence award for transformative early career contributions talks about his research on what captures human attention and how that influences behavior the winners of the 2022 aps janet taylor spence award for transformative early career contributions represent some of the brightest and most innovative young psychological scientists in the world in a series of mini-episodes under the cortex talks with each winner about their research and goals today we hear from brian anderson (texas a&m university) about his research on what captures human attention and how that influences behavior learn more about our sponsor by visiting https://macmillanlearningcom/psychsessions originally posted june 16 2022 by the association for psychological science visit their site to listen to the podcast or read the transcript below transcript charles blue (00:18) this is charles blue with the association for psychological science with the final in our series of mini episodes talking to the winners of the aps janet taylor spence award for transformative early career contributions today i have the pleasure of talking with brian anderson with texas a&m university about his work on attention and how it can evolve into obsession i think the best way to get started is if you just tell us a little bit about your current field of research anderson (00:49) i consider myself a perception scientist mostly a vision scientist and a cognitive neuroscientist i want to know what people tend to look at when they view the world in front of them and why and more specifically how the way they process their world changes with learning what you pay attention to tells us something very fundamental about your mental life since what you pay attention to determines what information you have access to and are considering when you reason about your world and decide how you should act im particularly interested in how what you direct your attention to can become ingrained and habitual to the point that you selectively process certain kinds of stimuli whether you want to or not this sort of phenomenology plays a big role in addiction and other unhealthy and undesired habits i want to understand how it happens that what someone pays attention to can go against their conscious will how that contributes to unhealthy decisions like persistent drug abuse and what we can do about it charles blue (01:49) are there any other examples for that thats kind of an interesting concept so what i pay attention to whether i want to or not like if i happen to be trying to get work done but theres some sports game going on in the room next to me i divert my attention that is something that will develop later in life or become habitual whats the connection there that youre really trying to find am i missing something anderson (02:16) yeah so its basically how your prior experience is going to cause certain things to draw your attention and those will draw your attention it turns out in circumstances when youre happy to have that happen in circumstances where you would much rather ignore it the tv on in the background is a good example so if youre a sports junkie maybe you really love watching that at home and its perfectly fine for you but then you go on a date so the person that you are absolutely compelled to try to convince is the center of your attention is consistently irked by the fact that youre looking past their head to the game on the television in the background and its that kind of i know i shouldnt be doing this i know i should be looking at the person in front of me but man that game is drawing my attention just like it does at home and i really love whatever sport is on the tv thats the kind of thing where looking at that right there and right now thats conflicting with my goals but theres something about that rewarding experience i get whenever i watch it that just keeps me coming back whether its good for me in this situation or not charles blue (03:14) throughout your research then have you come up with anything thats uniquely insightful in your opinion what is it that we now know about this connection that we didnt know before anderson (03:23) well my research really helped establish just how involuntary the orientation of attention can be to bother related and later in my career punishment related so when i got into attention research the model of attentional control that stood for decades really claimed that what people pay attention to is a joint product of really two factors in underlying control mechanisms one for your goals and intentions and another for the physical attributes of objects and specifically their perceptual salience or conspicuity like how bright they are under this model you certainly tend to preferentially attend or pay attention to reward related stimuli but its because youre motivated to do that reward shapes your goals and intentions so when youre in the restaurant its like well i want to watch the game thats why people pay attention to the game but that does a poor job of accounting for when its distracting you from this wonderful person you want to impress in front of you and so while reward certainly kind of has that role my research shows that kind of intentional side of reward cant be the full story and the same goes for why people attend aversibly conditioned stimulus and things that theyre afraid of anderson (04:31) people are distracted by those kinds of stimuli even when theyre completely past irrelevant theyre no longer predictive of anything theyre not rewarding to you in this moment or havent been for a little while theres nothing about them that causes them to stand out more than anything else from the background in terms of how physically bright or sailing they are what my research shows is that these kinds of previously rewarded stimuli will draw your attention when everything about historical theories of attention says they shouldnt which gives us pretty compelling evidence that you really cant help it so let me give you a really compelling experimental example of how this works please lets say i just show you an object so right here in my office im sitting on my desk a tissue box im going to pick it up if i gave you money every time you looked away from it cant look at it you got to look away from it to get money what do you think that would do you charles blue (05:21) id be forced to stare at the darn thing because its like whatever you do dont think about elephants kind of situation anderson (05:27) yeah in that particular situation but i could throw a little twist on there and i can give you lots of practice so you look away from it i pay you you look away from it i pay you you look away from it i pay you you do that over and over and over again charles blue (05:42) id be getting really good at it anderson (05:43) yeah you think youd be really good at looking away from it you think everything in your body everything in your brain would propel you away from it but it turns out its the exact opposite the more that i pay you to look away and the more you get paid for looking away the more you develop a tendency to look at it because your brain is just wired to orient you to rewarding things whether its good for you or not and so let me throw another twist on that lets say i show you the tushy box and every time you look at it i shock you and it hurts a little bit not much a little bit its very uncomfortable what do you think that would do to you charles blue (06:18) i would definitely try to look away at that point i like to avoid pain anderson (06:23) dont do that its like a slap on the wrist right for most kinds of behavior thats exactly what happens you do the thing that causes you to experience an aversive event less frequently its just basic reinforcement learning but it turns out with attention the more i shock you for looking at it the more you ironically tend to look at it charles blue (06:44) and im really trying not to look at it right now anderson (06:46) yeah its very effective and thats that white bear right thats a different phenomenon dont look at it and it causes you to look at it we actually have really clever ways experimentally of ruling that out we dont tell people dont look at the box because that will have an ironic effect like you hinted at earlier but we can take that out of the equation and show the more i shock you for looking at it the more you tend to look at it because your brain is wired to orientate the threat and you just do that automatically whether you want to or not charles blue (07:17) so theres a shifting of attention but this is not anything thats related to people with attention deficit disorder or anything that is i guess would be considered slightly away from what we would consider normal this is normal this is the way that the human brain just naturally perceives the world and gets behaviors ingrained charles blue (07:38) yeah absolutely thats one of the things that i found most fascinating in my career is that when i got into this it was known that attention can have this kind of pattern sometimes but it was thought to be the consequence of a broken attention system and addiction so when youre addicted to a substance its not uncommon to have a really difficult time ignoring cues for the drug even though you want to be absent and you know its bad for you you dont want to keep going back attention just keeps going back and we kind of knew that for some time but it was only in the context of addiction and people just kind of assume that oh this is what addiction does to you it breaks you in kind of interesting ways and that is unique to addiction but it turns out through a lot of the research that i and my colleagues have done that actually what you experience with drug dependence in that case is just drugs having working on you in the same kind of way that reward works on anybody else it may be amplified by drugs because its a very powerful reward experience but the process by which that affects you is a normal healthy process that drugs are co opting there the kind of way that everybodys attention system works charles blue (08:45) so looking to the future then if you needed to advance this research where are the gaps what dont we yet know what would you like to be able to find out to take this to the next level of understanding and maybe even some sort of therapeutic intervention if it were necessary anderson (09:02) yeah i think you hit the nail on the head there the main challenge i see in my field these days is what to do about these kinds of attentional biases especially in the case of addiction anxiety disorders other conditions in which attentional biases contribute to mental health issues you cant get your eyes off the drug what do we do about it approaches to attention and bias modification have a dismal history in my field they really just dont work well at all i dont have a good solution right now and i dont know anyone else who does either but i think were making progress and at the very least i can give you some really good insights into why some historical approaches for intentional bias modification and addiction and other conditions didnt work so well and maybe a little bit better on what to try moving forward as a potentially more promising approach charles blue (09:50) sorry i had my mic on you maybe if you could just point to something that we can do is there something that people in the public or therapists or people can actually work towards to help break this unhealthy attention bias anderson (10:07) yeah so dont reward people for ignoring something if you do that youre just going to wind up making it all the more attention grabbing so thats a bad thing to do so dont give them incentives to try to practice ignoring something you just make it all the more attention grabbing charles blue (10:23) something like if you have children and they want to play video games you dont say well if you stop playing video games for a week or if you stop at 06:00 ill give you a dollar every night thats a bad idea charles blue (10:35) wind up making it all the more attention grabbing and dont overtly punish people for paying attention to it either because that just makes it an aversively conditioned stimulus thats also going to be attention grabbing and so if you see your kids looking at stuff youd rather have not have them look at if you punish them right sharply right then and there it just makes it all the more attention grabbing attention is a habit driven thing so what do you want to do you want to create new habits that can compete with those old habits so dont think about what you want to do to make something less attention grabbing think about what you want to do to make something else more attention grabbing that can compete for your attention when you have that thing in your environment you want to ignore attention is a competitive process so my recommendation based on my findings so far is rather than try to fight against that plug into it and train attention to favor some other stimulus through reward learning and other kinds of habit learning in order to create a more effective competitor for the things that you dont want to pay attention to charles blue (11:29) id like to thank brian anderson very much for chatting with us this has been under the cortex thanks again for your time anderson (11:35) thank you faculty awards 2022 featured stories brian anderson cognitive neuroscience