Reward elicits cognitive control over emotional distraction: Evidence from pupillometry.
Attention is biased toward emotional stimuli, even when they are irrelevant to current goals. Motivation, elicited by performance-contingent reward, reduces behavioural emotional distraction. In emotionally neutral contexts, reward is thought to encourage use of a proactive cognitive control strateg...
| Published in: | Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience Vol. 19; no. 3; pp. 537 - 555 |
|---|---|
| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Published: |
Springer Nature
Jun2019
|
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=137229162&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 137229162 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 15307026 NA4 jtl: Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience issn: 15307026 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jun2019 vid: 19 iid: 3 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature place: New York, New York artinfo: ui: 137229162 10.3758/s13415-018-00669-w 137229162 ppf: 537 ppct: 18 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P tig: atl: Reward elicits cognitive control over emotional distraction: Evidence from pupillometry. aug: au: Walsh, Amy T. Carmel, David Grimshaw, Gina M. affil: School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, 6140, Wellington, New Zealand sug: ab: Attention is biased toward emotional stimuli, even when they are irrelevant to current goals. Motivation, elicited by performance-contingent reward, reduces behavioural emotional distraction. In emotionally neutral contexts, reward is thought to encourage use of a proactive cognitive control strategy, altering anticipatory attentional settings to more effectively suppress distractors. The current preregistered study investigates whether a similar proactive shift occurs even when distractors are highly arousing emotional images. We monitored pupil area, an online measure of both cognitive and emotional processing, to examine how reward influences the time course of control. Participants (n = 110) identified a target letter flanking an irrelevant central image. Images were meaningless scrambles on 75% of trials; on the remaining 25%, they were intact positive (erotic), negative (mutilation), or neutral images. Half the participants received financial rewards for fast and accurate performance, while the other half received no performance-contingent reward. Emotional distraction was greater than neutral distraction, and both were attenuated by reward. Consistent with behavioural findings, pupil dilation was greater following emotional than neutral distractors, and dilation to intact distractors (regardless of valence) was decreased by reward. Although reward did not enhance tonic pupil dilation (an index of sustained proactive control), exploratory analyses showed that reward altered the time course of control—eliciting a sharp, rapid, increase in dilation immediately preceding stimulus onset (reflecting dynamic use of anticipatory control), that extended until well after stimulus offset. These findings suggest that reward alters the time course of control by encouraging proactive preparation to rapidly disengage from emotional distractors. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
|---|