Value-modulated attentional capture in reward and punishment contexts, attentional control, and their relationship with psychopathology

Abstract

Attentional bias towards rewards has been extensively studied in both healthy and clinical populations. Several studies have shown an association between reward value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) and greater substance use. However, less is known about the association between these VMAC effects and internalizing symptoms. Moreover, while VMAC effects have also been found in punishment contexts, the association between punishment VMAC and psychopathology has not been studied so far. In the present two-part preregistered study, we adapted a novel VMAC task to also include a punishment context and examined associations with internalizing symptoms and substance use. Our results showed consistent VMAC effects in reward contexts across two separate studies. Attentional capture was stronger for distractors associated with high rewards than for low rewards. We replicated and extended previous findings by showing such VMAC effects in a substantially shorter task that also included alternating punishment blocks. Contrary to our expectations, we found no VMAC effects in punishment contexts and no direct associations between VMAC and symptom measures. Our results speak to the feasibility of assessing VMAC effects using a scalable and short behavioral online task, but the relationship with the development of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology remains uncertain.

Reliably Measuring Learning-Dependent Distractor Suppression with Eye Tracking

“…Using the probability of fixating the distractor, reliable learning-dependent reductions in distractor processing can be observed (Grégoire et al, 2022; Kim & Anderson, 2022), in addition to a measure of attention capture that is reliable for both young and older adults regardless of whether capture is overall suppressed under conditions of feature-search vs. singleton-search. Even when accounting for the increased variance in difference score calculations (Miller & Ulrich, 2013; Paap & Sawi, 2016; Weichselbaum et al, 2018), we demonstrate that oculomotor measures of attention capture on average exhibit strong reliability (mean across acquired values, r = .735) and are considerably more reliable than response time-based measures (Anderson & Kim, 2019; Freichel et al, 2023; Garre-Frutos et al, 2024; Ivanov et al, 2023).…”

“…Over the three measures, the authors report poor to moderate split-half reliability over response times and poor reliability over accuracy, in addition to poor test-retest reliability with respect to both response times and accuracy. Furthermore, three studies investigating selection history effects of reward learning in visual search also reported poor test-retest reliability of behavioral response times (Anderson & Kim, 2019; Freichel et al, 2023; Garre-Frutos et al, 2024). These studies collectively identified that response time exhibits poor reliability over experience-driven attention effects.…”