Exploring the effects of learning and motivation on visual cognition

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.

The project proposed here is primarily basic research and its immediate impact will be to influence thinking and theory development in related health and neuroscience academic arenas. This will primarily be achieved via publication in high impact, peer-reviewed, open access journals and through presentations at international conferences. However, the project also aims to develop knowledge that could significantly impact practice and policy in applied areas within the health and marketplace sectors. With this aim in mind, we outline here how that knowledge will be communicated and to whom.

Obesity and Overeating: Cue-induced motivational enhancements are a key problem in obesity (e.g., Nijs et al., 2010). This makes the knowledge gained from this project particularly relevant to academics and health practitioners concerned with controlling and preventing obesity and overeating. We will reach these groups through the University of Birmingham's Centre for Obesity Research (COR; www.obesity.bham.ac.uk), a campus-wide multidisciplinary collaboration to understand and tackle obesity. The Centre has excellent links with the local community and has a dedicated Translational Research Manager and Research Strategy Board to facilitate public engagement and develop research impact. We will communicate our findings via seminars and presentations to user groups (clinical practitioners), and by contributing to the Centre's website, with the long-term goal of helping the development of intervention programs.

Adolescent Mental Health: With the assistance of Prof. Stephen Wood, we will communicate our findings to local schools (e.g., parent-teacher groups) and adolescent mental health facilities and participate in a series of public engagement talks being set up by Prof. Wood on youth mental health and brain development.

Marketplace. Understanding how attention and incentive learning combine to influence motivation states is of keen interest to consumer product developers (e.g., Unilever) and to market researchers (e.g., Millward-Brown). Using long-standing links with Unilever and Millward-Brown, Raymond will present findings to user groups within these and other organisations. The goal of these seminars will be to help commercial organisations develop better ways to promote healthy consumption practices among consumers.

Public engagement. We will also work hard to engage the general public with the work we are doing. This will be achieved as follows:
(1) Collaboration with Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum. We will develop and deliver a session on motivation and attention to promote public engagement and dialogue on the research topic and the results of our project.
(2) Press. We will take full advantage of the University Press office to develop wide coverage of the research findings through internal and external press releases.
(3) Café Scientifique, Birmingham. One of the research team will present a science café talk at The Jekyll and Hyde Pub, as part of on going series of informal presentations.

Web-based dissemination
Working with the University of Birmingham's 'IdeasLab' (dedicated to the development of public awareness of research), we will promote the findings to the public and the media using web pages, facebook and twitter. In addition, the Visual Experience Laboratory at University of Birmingham will host a page describing the project as it unfolds and the Centre for Mind and Brain at UC Davis will host a link to this website and promote the project on its website.

Both the PDRA and PhD student will be involved in public engagement activities and will be encouraged to develop their skills in this area.