Affect-congruent attention modulates generalized reward expectations

by Daniel Bennett, Angela Radulescu, Sam Zorowitz, Valkyrie Felso, Yael Niv

Positive and negative affective states are respectively associated with optimistic and pessimistic expectations regarding future reward. One mechanism that might underlie these affect-related expectation biases is attention to positive- versus negative-valence features (e.g., attending to the positive reviews of a restaurant versus its expensive price). Here we tested the effects of experimentally induced positive and negative affect on feature-based attention in 120 participants completing a compound-generalization task with eye-tracking. We found that participants ’ reward expectations for novel compound stimuli were modulated in an affect-congruent way: positive affect induction increased reward expectations for compounds, whereas negative affect induction decreased reward expectations. Computational modelling and eye-tracking analyses each revealed that t hese effects were driven by affect-congruent changes in participants’ allocation of attention to high- versus low-value features of compounds. These results provide mechanistic insight into a process by which affect produces biases in generalized reward expectations.

Source: PLoS Computational Biology - December 21, 2023 Category: Biology Authors: Daniel Bennett Source Type: research