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Exploring the effects of learning and motivation on visual cognition

探索学习和动机对视觉认知的影响

基本信息

批准号：
ES/L000210/1
负责人：
Jane Raymond
金额：
$ 46.73万
依托单位：
University of Birmingham
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2014
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2014 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FL000210%2F1
关键词：
Exploring effects learning motivation visual

项目摘要

To maintain a healthy lifestyle, people need to be able to choose healthy options even when surrounded by tempting alternatives. For example, someone may plan to lose weight, but when an advertisement for pizza is suddenly noticed, his or her motivation to eat may rise sharply, overriding a previous priority to diet. This is because the state of mind that drives a person to make certain choices can arise suddenly and be initiated simply by exposure to objects and information. These stimuli are called incentive cues and they acquire their power to spontaneously motivate behaviour through learning. Such stimuli are also effective at catching our eye and filling our thoughts, sometimes making it difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. The aim of our project is to investigate how incentive cues affect perception and cognition because these critical processes are precursors to behavioural choice. Inappropriate choice in response to incentive cues is thought to be a leading cause of binge eating/drinking, relapse from abstinence in recovering drug addicts, and why some people, especially adolescents, engage in impulsive, risky behaviour. On the other hand, in multi-tasking situations, incentive cues can be helpful because they allow people to rapidly respond in optimal ways to new scenarios. This project will help identify how and when incentive cues help and hurt performance in visual cognition tasks.Our interest in this topic stems from our recent work showing that incentive cues can be highly effective at gaining momentary, exclusive access to the brain's visual cognition network. It is well established that the visual cognition network is severely limited in capacity and requires a selection mechanism so that only the most relevant information is processed. Visual selection appear to work by a process of competition, with the brain supplying biases favouring the processing of one stimulus over another. We hypothesise that incentive cues activate two different types of processing bias, one based on subjective value and the other based on arousal. We think these biases help incentive cues gain control over visual cognition at different stages. The project will test our hypotheses in three series of experiments on healthy young adults and a fourth series involving teenagers (a PhD project). We will also test the idea that people who are especially likely to be distracted and motivated inappropriately by incentive cues will show an unusually strong propensity to visually orient to cues during learning. If so, behaviour during learning could be used as an indicator of risk for problems in controlling motivation (as in impulsivity). In our experiments participants will learn to associate modest monetary rewards and punishers with different visual objects so that those objects can later act as incentive (or disincentive) cues. Then, participants will perform simple visual tasks involving these cues. We predict that performance on different tasks will be depend on whether cues are high versus low in arousal value or are high versus low in subjective value. We will also monitor visual orienting (eye movements) during learning to explore individual differences and also record the electroencephalogram (EEG) during engagement with visual tasks so that we can test our predictions that biases act at different times and in different ways during visual processing. The work conducted in this project will develop understanding of how learning and motivation influence visual attention and visual short-term memory. Importantly, the project is set within a well-developed neurobiological framework, so that findings will be relevant to theories of how brain mechanisms underlying reward learning interact with attention and memory. This advance in understanding will provide a crucial piece of the puzzle concerning how motivational disorders (e.g., addiction, overeating) occur and provide insight into how they might be treated.

为了保持健康的生活方式，即使周围有诱人的选择，人们也需要能够选择健康的选择。例如，某人可能计划减肥，但当突然注意到披萨广告时，他或她的进食动机可能会急剧上升，从而凌驾于之前的节食优先考虑之上。这是因为驱使一个人做出某些选择的心理状态可能会突然出现，并且只需通过接触物体和信息即可引发。这些刺激被称为激励线索，它们通过学习获得自发激励行为的能力。此类刺激还可以有效地吸引我们的注意力并充实我们的思想，有时使我们难以专注于手头的任务。我们项目的目的是研究激励线索如何影响感知和认知，因为这些关键过程是行为选择的先兆。对激励线索的不恰当选择被认为是导致暴饮暴食、戒毒后复吸以及为什么有些人，尤其是青少年会做出冲动、危险行为的主要原因。另一方面，在多任务情况下，激励线索可能会有所帮助，因为它们允许人们以最佳方式快速响应新场景。该项目将有助于确定激励线索如何以及何时帮助和损害视觉认知任务中的表现。我们对这个主题的兴趣源于我们最近的研究表明，激励线索可以非常有效地获得对大脑视觉认知网络的瞬时、专有访问。众所周知，视觉认知网络的容量受到严重限制，需要一种选择机制，以便只处理最相关的信息。视觉选择似乎是通过竞争过程发挥作用的，大脑提供的偏见有利于处理一种刺激而不是另一种刺激。我们假设激励线索会激活两种不同类型的处理偏差，一种基于主观价值，另一种基于唤醒。我们认为这些偏见有助于激励线索在不同阶段控制视觉认知。该项目将通过针对健康年轻人的三个系列实验和涉及青少年的第四个系列（博士项目）来检验我们的假设。我们还将测试这样一种观点，即那些特别容易因激励线索而分心和不当激励的人，在学习过程中会表现出异常强烈的视觉导向倾向。如果是这样，学习期间的行为可以用作控制动机（如冲动）方面出现问题的风险指标。在我们的实验中，参与者将学会将适度的金钱奖励和惩罚者与不同的视觉对象联系起来，以便这些对象以后可以充当激励（或抑制）线索。然后，参与者将执行涉及这些提示的简单视觉任务。我们预测，不同任务的表现将取决于线索的唤醒值是高还是低，或者主观价值是高还是低。我们还将在学习探索个体差异的过程中监测视觉定向（眼球运动），并在参与视觉任务期间记录脑电图（EEG），以便我们可以测试我们的预测，即偏见在视觉处理过程中的不同时间和以不同方式起作用。该项目中进行的工作将加深对学习和动机如何影响视觉注意力和视觉短期记忆的理解。重要的是，该项目建立在一个完善的神经生物学框架内，因此研究结果将与奖励学习背后的大脑机制如何与注意力和记忆相互作用的理论相关。这种理解上的进步将为动机障碍（例如成瘾、暴饮暴食）如何发生提供一个关键的拼图，并提供对如何治疗这些障碍的见解。