Motivation versus aversive processing during perception

Reward facilitates performance and boosts cognitive performance across many tasks. At the same time, negative affective stimuli interfere with performance when they are not relevant to the task at hand. Yet, the investigation of how reward and negative stimuli impact perception and cognition has taken place in a manner that is largely independent of each other. How reward and negative emotion simultaneously contribute to behavioral performance is currently poorly understood. The aim of the present study was to investigate how the simultaneous manipulation of positive motivational processing (here manipulated via reward) and aversive processing (here manipulated via negative picture viewing) influence behavior during a perceptual task. We tested 2 competing hypotheses about the impact of reward on negative picture viewing. On the one hand, suggestions about the automaticity of emotional processing predict that negative picture interference would be relatively immune to reward. On the other, if affective visual processing is not obligatory, as we have argued in the past, reward may counteract the deleterious effect of more potent negative pictures. We found that reward counteracted the effect of potent, negative distracters during a visual discrimination task. Thus, when sufficiently motivated, participants were able to reduce the deleterious impact of bodily mutilation stimuli.