Subliminal determinants of cue-guided choice

Abstract

By anticipating potential rewards, external cues can guide behavior to achieve a goal. Whether the conscious elaboration of these cues is necessary to elicit cue-guided choices is still unknown. the goal of the present study is to test whether the subliminal presentation of a visual cue previously paired with a reward is sufficient to bias responses that can lead to the same or a similar reward. To this aim, three experiments compared the subliminal and supraliminal presentation of reward-associated cues during a pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer task. in line with previous evidence, results showed that the supraliminal presentation of reward-associated pavlovian cues biased participant's choice towards motivationally similar rewards (general transfer) as well as towards rewards sharing the precise sensory-specific properties of the cue (outcome-specific transfer). In striking contrast, subliminal cues biased choice only towards motivationally similar rewards (general transfer). taken together, these findings suggest that cue-guided choices are modulated by the level of perceptual threshold (i.e., subliminal vs supraliminal) of reward-associated cues. Although conscious elaboration of the cue is necessary to guide choice towards a specific reward, subliminal processing is still sufficient to push towards choices sharing the motivational properties of the cue. implications for everyday life, clinical conditions, and theoretical accounts of cue-guided choices are discussed.

Modulation of cue-guided choices by transcranial direct current stimulation

“…sharing the appetitive value, general transfer). These results are in line with and extend the current literature on cue-guided choice, supporting the idea that separate neural substrates underpin these two effects and further highlighting a dissociation between outcome-specific and general transfer (Bray et al, 2008;Garofalo et al, , 2019Garofalo et al, , 2020Garofalo & di Pellegrino, 2015Lewis et al, 2013;Morris et al, 2015;Prévost et al, 2012;Talmi et al, 2008). Moreover, the present results shed new light on the cortical structures involved in cue-guided choice by providing the first evidence for direct involvement of the lateral prefrontal cortex in outcome-specific transfer.…”

“…Based on this evidence, we argue that sensory-specific cue-guided choice is likely to rely on the lateral prefrontal cortex for the active maintenance of a detailed representation of the sensory properties of each choice-reward pairing elicited by the cue which are, in turn, used to direct choice. In line with this, previous studies showed that high-level cognitive abilities, such as working memory (Garofalo et al, 2019), and supraliminal (vs subliminal) presentation of the reward-associated cue (Garofalo et al, 2020) are crucial for the expression of outcome specific, but not general transfer. In contrast, such area may not be as crucial for the general form of cue-guided choices which results from an increase in motivation towards obtaining any reward, and may rather rely on subcortical areas (Corbit & Balleine, 2015;Dolan & Dayan, 2013;Holland, 2004).…”

“…This phase lasted about 8 minutes. This Pavlovian speeded reaction-time response has been successfully used to obtain a behavioral measure of Pavlovian learning (Garofalo et al, 2019(Garofalo et al, , 2020Garofalo & di Pellegrino, 2015;Talmi et al, 2008). To avoid a possible instrumental component, participants were explicitly told and demonstrated that reward delivery was not dependent upon their response.…”

“…Former studies mainly focused on the role of limbic and basal ganglia structures (Bray et al, 2008;Mendelsohn et al, 2014;Prévost et al, 2012;Talmi et al, 2008;van Steenbergen et al, 2017), which may be only a part of the broader neural network involved in cue-guided choice, also comprising cortical structures like medial and lateral prefrontal regions (Cavanagh et al, 2013;Guitart-Masip et al, 2012;Hayashi et al, 2013;Swart et al, 2018). These studies highlighted the presence of neural (Bray et al, 2008;Lewis et al, 2013;Morris et al, 2015;Prévost et al, 2012;Talmi et al, 2008) -as well as behavioral (Garofalo et al, 2019(Garofalo et al, , 2020Garofalo & di Pellegrino, 2015 dissociations between general and outcome-specific cue guided choice (Corbit & Balleine, 2005;Dolan & Dayan, 2013;Garofalo et al, 2019Garofalo et al, , 2020Garofalo & di Pellegrino, 2017;. Notably, the limbic system and the basal ganglia are strongly interconnected with the prefrontal cortex and exchange relevant information for decision-making (Alexander & Crutcher, 1990;Haber et al, 2006;Jarbo & Verstynen, 2015;Makino et al, 2016;Moustafa et al, 2013;van Holstein et al, 2018).…”

Task Difficulty Regulates How Conscious and Unconscious Monetary Rewards Boost the Performance of Working Memory: An Event-Related Potential Study

“…Human beings tend to adjust their behaviors according to the rewards they might gain. To date, considerable studies have been carried out on human reward system, indicating that rewards can improve the performance of cognitive functions, such as working memory ( Bijleveld et al, 2011 ; Capa et al, 2013 ), conflict monitoring ( van Gaal and Lamme, 2012 ), bias responses ( Garofalo et al, 2020 ), self-face processing ( Zhan et al, 2017 ), and cognitive inhibition ( Diao et al, 2016 ). Drawing on an incentive force task, Pessiglione et al (2007) inspected the activation of the brain to the unconscious monetary reward cues, which revealed that the motor function could be improved with higher amounts of unconscious monetary reward, as compared to that with lower ones.…”