Cues that signal rewards can motivate reward-seeking behaviors, even for outcomes that are not currently desired. Three experiments examined this phenomenon, using an outcome-selective Pavlovian-instrumental transfer (PIT) design and an outcome devaluation procedure. In Experiment 1, participants learned to perform one response to earn crisps points and another response to earn popcorn points. One outcome was then devalued by adulterating it to make it taste unpleasant. On test, overall response choice was biased toward the outcome that had not been devalued, indicating goal-directed control. Stimuli that signaled crisps and popcorn also biased instrumental response choice toward their respective outcomes (a PIT effect). Most importantly, the strength of this bias was not influenced by the devaluation manipulation. In contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that when stimuli signaled equal probability of the two outcomes, cue-elicited response choice was sensitive to the devaluation manipulation. Experiment 3 confirmed this conclusion by demonstrating a selective avoidance of the cued, devalued outcome. Together, these data support a goal-directed model of PIT in which expected outcome probability and value make independent contributions to response choice. (PsycINFO Database Record

RationaleDrug cue reactivity plays a crucial role in addiction, yet the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. According to the binary associative account, drug stimuli retrieve an expectation of the drug outcome, which, in turn, elicits the associated drug-seeking response (S-O-R). By contrast, according to the hierarchical account, drug stimuli retrieve an expectation that the contingency between the drug-seeking response and the drug outcome is currently more effective, promoting performance of the drug-seeking response (S:R-O).MethodsThe current study discriminated between these two accounts using a biconditional Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) task with 128 alcohol drinkers. A biconditional discrimination was first trained in which two responses produced alcohol and food outcomes, respectively, and these response-outcome contingencies were reversed across two discriminative stimuli (SDs). In the PIT test, alcohol and food cues were compounded with the two SDs to examine their impact on percent alcohol choice in extinction.ResultsIt was found that alcohol and food cues selectively primed choice of the response that earned that outcome in each SD (p < .001), and this effect was associated with participants’ belief that cues signalled greater effectiveness of that response (p < .0001).ConclusionsThe alcohol stimulus could not have selectively primed the alcohol-seeking response through binary S-O-R associations because the drug outcome was equally associated with both responses. Rather, the alcohol stimulus must have retrieved an expectation that the response-alcohol contingency available in the current context was more likely to be effective (S:R-O), which primed performance of the alcohol-seeking response.

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Potts and Shanks (2014) recently reported that making mistakes improved the encoding of novel information compared with simply studying. This benefit of generating errors is counterintuitive, since it resulted in less study time and more opportunity for proactive interference. Five experiments examined the effect of generating errors versus studying on item recognition, cued recall, associative recognition, two-alternative forced choice and multiple-choice performance. Following Potts and Shanks (2014), participants first attempted to learn the English definitions of either very rare English words or Euskara nouns. During encoding, participants either guessed the definition (and almost always made an error) before the correct definition was revealed, or simply studied the words for an equivalent period. Experiments 1-4 used rare English words. In these experiments, generating errors led to better subsequent recognition of both the cues and targets compared with studying (Experiments 1 and 3). Tests of cued recall and associative recognition, by contrast, revealed no significant benefit of generating errors over studying (Experiments 1-3). Generating errors during encoding also improved performance on a two-alternative forced choice test when the correct target was presented with a novel foil, but not when the familiarity of the target and the foil was matched (Experiment 4). In Experiment 5, a different set of materials-Euskara nouns-and a different (intermixed) encoding procedure was adopted. Here, guessing improved target recognition (performance was improved on a multiple-choice test with unfamiliar foils), but impaired cued recall performance. These results suggest that, when learning word pairs that do not have a pre-existing semantic association, generating errors strengthens the cues and targets in isolation, but does not strengthen the cue-target associations.

Recent studies of visual search suggest that learning about valued outcomes (rewards and punishments) influences the likelihood that distractors will capture spatial attention and slow search for a target, even when those value-related distractors have never themselves been the targets of search. In the present study, we demonstrated a related effect in the context of temporal, rather than spatial, selection. Participants were presented with a temporal stream of pictures in a fixed central location and had to identify the orientation of a rotated target picture. Response accuracy was reduced if the rotated target was preceded by a "valued" distractor picture that signaled that a correct response to the target would be rewarded (and an incorrect response punished), relative to a distractor picture that did not signal reward or punishment. This effect of signal value on response accuracy was short-lived, being most prominent with a short lag between distractor and target. Impairment caused by a valued distractor was observed if participants were explicitly instructed regarding its relation to reward/punishment (Exps. 1, 3, and 4), or if they could learn this relationship only via trial-by-trial experience (Exp. 2). These findings show that the influence of signal value on attentional capture extends to temporal selection, and also demonstrate that value-related distractors can interfere with the conscious perception of subsequent target information.