Appetitive and aversive outcome associations modulate exogenous cueing

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology

Background:

• Exogenous cueing tasks are used to study attentional capture.
• Previous research has not fully explored how outcome associations influence attentional dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how appetitive and aversive outcomes associated with visual cues affect attentional capture and deployment.
• To determine if outcome valence influences attention over time during exogenous cueing.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments used an exogenous cueing task with colored cues predicting monetary gains (appetitive), losses (aversive), or neutral outcomes.
• Participants responded to targets, with cue-outcome associations learned through classical conditioning.

Main Results:

• Appetitive cues strengthened attentional capture, while aversive cues initially facilitated but later reduced capture compared to neutral cues.
• At long cue-target delays, attention lingered on appetitive cue locations but was reoriented away from aversive cue locations.
• All abrupt-onset cues initially captured attention regardless of outcome association.

Conclusions:

• Outcome valence significantly modulates attentional deployment following exogenous cueing, especially over time.
• Attention remains at locations associated with rewards but is released from locations associated with losses.
• Visual cue color predicting outcomes can dynamically alter attentional capture and reorienting.