Blaming the victims of your own mistakes: How visual search accuracy influences evaluation of stimuli

Mechanisms underlying food devaluation after response inhibition to food

Multiple studies reveal that a requirement to stop a response to appetitive food stimuli causes devaluation of these stimuli. However, the mechanism underlying food devaluation after stopping is still under debate. The immediate-affect theory suggests that an increase in negative affect after stopping a response is the driving force for food devaluation. A competing value-updating theory presumes that food devaluation after stopping occurs through the need to align behavior with goals. The current study assessed how food devaluation after response inhibition is influenced by negative emotional reactivity and behavior-goal alignment on a trial-by-trial basis. The study included 60 healthy participants who completed a Food-Stop-Signal-Emotion task. Participants categorized high vs. low-calorie food stimuli and stopped their response upon encountering a stop signal. Subsequently, participants made subjective negativity ratings of negative- or neutral-valenced emotional images, and rated their desire to eat the previously depicted food. In contrast to predictions made by the immediate-affect account, food devaluation after stopping was not mediated nor moderated via changes in negative emotional reactivity after stopping. In support of the value-updating account, food devaluation was modulated by behavior-goal alignment, indicated by larger food devaluation after successful vs. failed stopping. In agreement with this theory, the findings indicate that devaluation occurs more strongly when performance aligns with the task requirement. This study sheds light on the mechanism that likely underlies food devaluation after stopping. Implications regarding applied use of food-inhibition trainings are discussed.

Response inhibition immediately elicits negative affect and devalues associated stimuli: Evidence from facial electromyography

Response inhibition negatively impacts the emotional and motivational significance of associated stimuli. Current accounts question whether this stimulus devaluation effect occurs immediately via negative affect elicited by inhibition, or only occurs later via a misattribution of decreased fluency as unpleasantness in the context of an explicit affective-evaluation task. Using facial electromyography, we recorded indirect physiological markers of affective response during a response-inhibition (Go/No-go) task to test opposing predictions arising from the immediate-affect and delayed-misattribution hypotheses. Engagement of the corrugator supercilli-a muscle closely associated with negative affect-was greater during periods when response inhibition was applied (No-go trials) than when not applied (Go trials). Moreover, corrugator engagement during response-inhibition predicted the magnitude of stimulus devaluation measured behaviorally in subsequent subjective ratings (How cheerful?), with greater engagement during No-go trials that contained abstract-art stimuli later rated negatively than during trials that contained items later rated positively. These results support the immediate-affect hypothesis and converge with prior neuroimaging evidence to suggest that the negative impact of inhibition promptly alters the coding of stimulus value. In contrast, none of the delayed-misattribution based predictions were confirmed.

Implicit processing during change blindness revealed with mouse-contingent and gaze-contingent displays

People often miss salient events that occur right in front of them. This phenomenon, known as change blindness, reveals the limits of visual awareness. Here, we investigate the role of implicit processing in change blindness using an approach that allows partial dissociation of covert and overt attention. Traditional gaze-contingent paradigms adapt the display in real time according to current gaze position. We compare such a paradigm with a newly designed mouse-contingent paradigm where the visual display changes according to the real-time location of a user-controlled mouse cursor, effectively allowing comparison of change detection with mainly overt attention (gaze-contingent display; Experiment 2) and untethered overt and covert attention (mouse-contingent display; Experiment 1). We investigate implicit indices of target detection during change blindness in eye movement and behavioral data, and test whether affective devaluation of unnoticed targets may contribute to change blindness. The results show that unnoticed targets are processed implicitly, but that the processing is shallower than if the target is consciously detected. Additionally, the partial untethering of covert attention with the mouse-contingent display changes the pattern of search and leads to faster detection of the changing target. Finally, although it remains possible that the deployment of covert attention is linked to implicit processing, the results fall short of establishing a direct connection.

Disillusionment

Recent research has shown that perceptual processes carry intrinsic affect. But prior studies have only manipulated the occurrence of perceptual processes by presenting two different stimulus categories. The present studies go beyond this by manipulating perceptual expectations for identical stimuli. Seven experiments demonstrated that objectively identical stimuli become visually disappointing and are liked less when they violate the expectation that an intrinsically pleasant perceptual process will occur compared to when there is no perceptual expectation. These effects were specific to violations of perceptual expectations. By using between-subjects designs, participants' insight into the experimental manipulation was prevented. In combination with the use of identical stimuli across conditions, this provides the most stringent test of the idea that perception is intrinsically (un-)pleasant yet. The results are related to predictive coding frameworks and provide an explanation for why people sometimes enjoy additional perceptual effort.

Cognitive-behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of the affective consequences of ignoring stimulus representations in working memory

Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items, a phenomenon attributed to the affective consequences of attentional inhibition. Here we investigated the generality of this "distractor devaluation" phenomenon by asking whether ignoring stimuli represented internally within visual working memory has the same affective consequences. In two experiments we presented participants with two or three visual stimuli and then, after the stimuli were no longer visible, provided an attentional cue indicating which item in memory was the target they would have to later recall, and which were task-irrelevant distractors. Participants subsequently judged how much they liked these stimuli. Previously-ignored distractors were consistently rated less favorably than targets, replicating prior findings of distractor devaluation. To gain converging evidence, in Experiment 2, we also examined the electrophysiological processes associated with devaluation by measuring individual differences in attention (N2pc) and working memory (CDA) event-related potentials following the attention cue. Larger amplitude of an N2pc-like component was associated with greater devaluation, suggesting that individuals displaying more effective selection of memory targets-an act aided by distractor inhibition-displayed greater levels of distractor devaluation. Individuals showing a larger post-cue CDA amplitude (but not pre-cue CDA amplitude) also showed greater distractor devaluation, supporting prior evidence that visual working-memory resources have a functional role in effecting devaluation. Together, these findings demonstrate that ignoring working-memory representations has affective consequences, and adds to the growing evidence that the contribution of selective-attention mechanisms to a wide range of human thoughts and behaviors leads to devaluation.

Blame everyone: Error-related devaluation in Eriksen flanker task

Preferences are determined not only by stimuli themselves but also by the way they are processed in the brain. The efficacy of cognitive processing during previous interactions with stimuli is particularly important. When observers make errors in simple tasks such as visual search, recognition, or categorization, they later dislike the stimuli associated with errors. Here we test whether this error-related devaluation exists in Erisken flanker task and whether it depends on the distribution of attention. We found that both attended stimuli (targets) and ignored ones (distractors) are devaluated after errors on compatible trials but not incompatible ones. The extent of devaluation is similar for targets and distractors, indicating that distribution of attention does not significantly influence the attribution of error-related negative affect. We discuss this finding in light of the possible mechanisms of error-related devaluation.

On the joys of perceiving: Affect as feedback for perceptual predictions

How we perceive, attend to, or remember the stimuli in our environment depends on our preferences for them. Here we argue that this dependence is reciprocal: pleasures and displeasures are heavily dependent on cognitive processing, namely, on our ability to predict the world correctly. We propose that prediction errors, inversely weighted with prior probabilities of predictions, yield subjective experiences of positive or negative affect. In this way, we link affect to predictions within a predictive coding framework. We discuss how three key factors - uncertainty, expectations, and conflict - influence prediction accuracy and show how they shape our affective response. We demonstrate that predictable stimuli are, in general, preferred to unpredictable ones, though too much predictability may decrease this liking effect. Furthermore, the account successfully overcomes the "dark-room" problem, explaining why we do not avoid stimulation to minimize prediction error. We further discuss the implications of our approach for art perception and the utility of affect as feedback for predictions within a prediction-testing architecture of cognition.