Punishment-modulated attentional capture is context specific.

Abstract

Attention prioritizes stimuli previously associated with punishment. Despite the importance of this process for survival and adaptation, the potential generalization of punishment-related attentional biases has been largely ignored in the literature. This study aimed to determine whether stimulus-punishment associations learned in a specific context bias attention in another context (in which the stimulus was never paired with punishment). We examined this issue using an antisaccade task in which participants had to shift their gaze in the opposite direction of a colored square during stimulus-outcome learning. Two contexts and three colors were employed. One color was associated with punishment (i.e., electrical shock) in one context and never paired with punishment in the other context. For a second color, the punishment-context relationship was reversed. A third color never paired with shock in either context (neutral) was included in Experiment 1 but absent in Experiment 2. Participants then performed search for a shape-defined target in an extinction phase (in which no shock was delivered) in which attentional bias for the colors was assessed. Context was manipulated via the background image upon which the stimuli were presented. In each of the two experiments, a bias to selectively orient toward the color that had been associated with punishment in the current context was observed, suggesting that punishmentmodulated attentional priority is context specific.

Surprisingly inflexible: Statistically learned suppression of distractors generalizes across contexts

“…In contrast to the present results, both reward-and punishment-based learning, which directly associate stimulus features with some outcome, have context-dependent effects on attentional priority (Anderson, 2015;Anderson & Kim, 2018;Grégoire et al, 2020). This is suggestive of a distinction between associative learning and statistical learning in the way they treat context.…”

“…It is assumed that the three components of attentional selection (top-down, bottom-up, and selection history) are combined in an integrated priority map, where the input with the highest priority is selected in a winner-takes-all fashion (Theeuwes, 2018). Selection history effects are studied in paradigms such as contextual cueing (Chun & Jiang, 1998;Goujon et al, 2015), reward or punishment learning (Anderson et al, 2011;Della Libera & Chelazzi, 2009;Grégoire et al, 2020), and as of recently statistical learning of distractor suppression (e.g., Ferrante et al, 2018;Wang & Theeuwes, 2018b). Of interest to the current study, contextual cueing, reward learning, and punishment learning have been shown to involve contextdependent learning.…”

“…Context-independent learning can only be short-lived, requiring a constant re-learning of biases for contexts that have already been encountered, whereas context-dependent learning allows learned regularities to be stored while new ones are being learned or updated. It should come as no surprise then, that reward learning (Anderson, 2015;Anderson & Kim, 2018), punishment-based learning (Grégoire et al, 2020), and contextual cueing (Brooks et al, 2010;Jiang & Song, 2005) have been shown to be context dependent. In contextual cueing, a hyper specificity was reported, with no transfer at all between contexts that only differed in color (Jiang & Song, 2005).…”

Pavlovian learning in the selection history-dependent control of overt spatial attention.

“…These findings are consistent with previous studies demonstrating that spatial attentional biases arising from reward learning are contingent upon awareness of the reward contingencies (Mine et al, 2021; Sisk et al, 2020; see also Anderson & Kim, 2018a, 2018b; Liao et al, 2021), which contrasts with the influence of reward learning and aversive conditioning on feature-based attention that can be implicit (Grégoire & Anderson, 2019; Grégoire et al, 2021, 2020; Hopkins et al, 2016; Leganes-Fonteneau et al, 2018, 2019), suggesting a fundamental difference between how selection history shapes feature-based and space-based attentional biases. Like feature-based attentional biases arising from both reward learning and aversive conditioning, however, Pavlovian learning is implicated, which may reflect a broad principle in the selection history-dependent control of attention.…”

An adaptive view of attentional control.

“…In the case of value-driven attention, if a stimulus is associated with reward in one context but not in another, attentional capture by that stimulus will be specific to when it appears in the context in which it was rewarded (Anderson, 2015a, 2015b; see also Anderson & Kim, 2018a, 2018b). Likewise, attentional capture by aversively conditioned stimuli is context-specific (Grégoire et al, in press). At the same time, if context is not diagnostic of whether a particular stimulus predicts a reward during learning, there is a tendency to generalize such learning to attention allocation in a novel context (Anderson et al, 2012).…”