Counterintuitive effects of negative social feedback on attention

Abstract

Which stimuli we pay attention to is strongly influenced by learning. Stimuli previously associated with reward outcomes, such as money and food, and stimuli previously associated with aversive outcomes, such as monetary loss and electric shock, automatically capture attention. Social reward (happy expressions) can bias attention towards associated stimuli, but the role of negative social feedback in biasing attentional selection remains unexplored. On the one hand, negative social feedback often serves to discourage particular behaviours. If attentional selection can be curbed much like any other behavioural preference, we might expect stimuli associated with negative social feedback to be more readily ignored. On the other hand, if negative social feedback influences attention in the same way that other aversive outcomes do, such feedback might ironically bias attention towards the stimuli it is intended to discourage selection of. In the present study, participants first completed a training phase in which colour targets were associated with negative social feedback. Then, in a subsequent test phase, these same colour stimuli served as task-irrelevant distractors during a visual search task. The results strongly support the latter interpretation in that stimuli previously associated with negative social feedback impaired search performance.

Keywords: Selective attention; aversive conditioning; punishment; social feedback.

Figure 1

Sequence and time course of trial events. (A) During the training phase, participants reported the orientation of the bar within the color-defined (red or green) target with a keypress. Independent of whether the response was correct or not, the target display was followed by feedback consisting of the presentation of a face. One target color was associated with a greater probability of an angry face (80%) vs a neutral face (20%), while for the other target color this mapping was reversed. Note that in the actual experiment, the faces used were images of real people taken from the AR face database. (B) In the test phase, participants searched for a shape singleton target (diamond among circles or circle among diamonds) and reported the orientation of the bar within the target as vertical or horizontal. On a subset of trials, one of the nontargets was rendered in the color of a former target from the training phase.

Figure 2

Behavioral performance. (A) Mean response time and (B) accuracy by distractor condition in the test phase of Experiment 1. Error bars reflect the within-subjects S.E.M.