New paper by Johannes Algermissen in Journal of Experimental Psychology

Our study titled “Goal-directed recruitment of Pavlovian biases through selective visual attention.” is now posted online in Journal of experimental psychology. Here, we examined prospective outcomes bias behavior in a "Pavlovian" manner, namely reward prospect invigorates action, while punishment prospect suppresses it.

Theories have posited Pavlovian biases as global action "priors" in unfamiliar or uncontrollable environments. However, this account fails to explain the strength of these biases-causing frequent action slips-even in well-known environments. We propose that Pavlovian control is additionally useful if flexibly recruited by instrumental control. Specifically, instrumental action plans might shape selective attention to reward/punishment information and thus the input to Pavlovian control.

In two eye-tracking samples (N = 35/64), we observed that Go/NoGo action plans influenced when and for how long participants attended to reward/punishment information, which in turn biased their responses in a Pavlovian manner. Participants with stronger attentional effects showed higher performance. Thus, humans appear to align Pavlovian control with their instrumental action plans, extending its role beyond action defaults to a powerful tool ensuring robust action execution

An official preprint of the paper can be found here. If you want to know more, please get in touch with Johannes or Hanneke!