The Cue-Approach Task as a General Mechanism for Long-Term Non-Reinforced Behavioral Change

Abstract

Recent findings show that preferences for food items can be modified without external reinforcements using the cue-approach task. In the task, the mere association of food item images with a neutral auditory cue and a speeded button press, resulted in enhanced preferences for the associated stimuli. In a series of 10 independent samples with a total of 255 participants, we show for the first time that using this non-reinforced method we can enhance preferences for faces, fractals and affective images, as well as snack foods, using auditory, visual and even aversive cues. This change was highly durable in follow-up sessions performed one to six months after training. Preferences were successfully enhanced for all conditions, except for negative valence items. These findings promote our understanding of nonreinforced change, suggest a boundary condition for the effect and lay the foundation for development of novel applications.Behavioral change is an essential tool to improve health and quality of life, from treating addictions to eating and mood disorders [1][2][3] . Scientific research on behavioral change mainly focused on the effects of external reinforcements 2,4-7 or altering the presentation of the decision problem [8][9][10] . Recently, the cue-approach training (CAT) 11 paradigm was introduced as a successful method for enhancing preferences for food items, without external reinforcement, context change or self-control. Here, we test multiple hypotheses that are aimed to shed light on this mechanism by studying its generalizability to multiple stimuli and cues, as well as the long-term durability of the effect. In the cue-approach task, participants initially indicated their preferences for a set of snack-food items by specifying their willingness to pay for each item in an auction procedure. Then, in the CAT, some of the items were consistently associated with a neutral auditory cue and a speeded button press response (these stimuli were termed 'Go items'), whereas other stimuli were presented without a cue ('No-Go items'). In the following probe phase, participants were asked to choose a snack they would like to eat at the end of the experiment. Each probe-choice comprised of a pair of items with similar initial values, in which only one of the two snacks was a Go item. Results showed that the mere association of snack-food images with a neutral auditory cue and a speeded button press, resulted in enhanced preferences for Go items over No-Go items. This preference change effect varied across different value categories -resulting in enhanced preferences for snack-food items of initial high-value, yet significantly less prominent change in preferences for low-value items. The effect was maintained two-months following training 11 . Additional studies with the cue-approach task 12 found that for the behavioral change to take place, CAT required the presence of both a speeded button press response and a cue; i.e. CAT had no effect when training was conducted with an early cue onset which was followed with ...

Enhanced striatal and prefrontal activity is associated with individual differences in nonreinforced preference change for faces

“…Eight participants took part in the experiment, but were excluded from the final analysis: Three participants were excluded due to incidental clinical findings; two participants did not complete the tasks inside the scanner; one participant was excluded due to predefined training exclusion criteria (ladder drop below 200-ms, see below) which was used in previous CAT experiments (Salomon et al, 2018); one participant chose the Go stimuli in 100% of probe trials and thus could not be analyzed, and another participant had technical issues with their scans.…”

“…We used a stimulus set of 60 face images, selected from the Siblings Dataset (Vieira, Bottino, Laurentini, & De Simone, 2014), as used in a previous behavioral CAT publication with faces (Salomon et al, 2018).…”

“…From these transitivity scores, we defined an exclusion criterion, similarly to previous studies (Salomon et al, 2018); participants with transitivity scores 3 SD below the group mean would be excluded from analysis due to intransitivity of choices. An intransitive choice pattern is characterized by densely distributed scores around the center of 0.5.…”

“…The CAT task's protocol followed that of previous CAT with faces (Salomon et al, 2018). Each stimulus in the training set was presented individually on the screen for 1,000 ms, once during each training run (see Figure 1c).…”

“…The strong preference response naturally evoked by face stimuli, even during preference-irrelevant tasks (Lebreton, Jorge, Michel, Thirion, & Pessiglione, 2009), lends them as prime stimuli to examine processes of preference modification. Additionally, recent studies with faces have found that CAT enhanced preference for both high-and low-value face stimuli (Salomon et al, 2018). Thus, faces uniquely enabled us to focus the fMRI analysis within this network of specialized regions, potentially bridging early visual processing with high-level feature representation, including preferences.…”