Abstract
We recently showed that rapidly stopping an action in the face of a reward-related stimulus reduces the subjective value of that stimulus (Wessel et al., 2014). In that study, there were three phases. In an initial learning phase, geometric shapes were associated with monetary value via implicit learning. In a subsequent treatment phase, half the shapes were paired with action stopping, and half were not. In a final auction phase, shapes that had been paired with stopping in the treatment phase were subjectively perceived as less valuable compared to those that were not. Exploratory post hoc analyses showed that the stopping-induced devaluation effect was larger for participants with greater explicit knowledge of stimulus values. Here, we repeated the study in 65 participants to systematically test whether the level of explicit knowledge influences the degree of devaluation. The results replicated the core result that action stopping reduces stimulus value. Furthermore, they showed that this effect was indeed significantly larger in participants with more explicit knowledge of the relative stimulus values in the learning phase. These results speak to the robustness of the stopping-induced devaluation effect, and furthermore imply that behavioral therapies using stopping could be successful in devaluing real-world stimuli, insofar as stimulus values are explicitly represented. Finally, to facilitate future investigations into the applicability of these findings, as well as the mechanisms underlying stopping-induced stimulus devaluation, we herein provide open source code for the behavioral paradigm.
Highlights
Overvaluation of reward-associated stimuli is a common feature of many unhealthy and maladaptive behaviors
We went further by showing that stopping-induced stimulus devaluation is increased in participants that have explicit knowledge about the relative values of rewarding stimuli, compared to participants whose stimulus-reward associations are fully implicit
Our demonstration that stopping-induced devaluation is greater for explicit value representations could have strong practical importance
Summary
Overvaluation of reward-associated stimuli is a common feature of many unhealthy and maladaptive behaviors. Obese people show an increased response in value-associated brain regions when viewing pictures of high-caloric foods (Rothemund et al, 2007), smoking-related cues increase nicotine consumption and craving in smokers (Hogarth et al, 2010), and monetary cues evoke disproportionate value-related neural activity in pathological gamblers (Clark et al, 2013; Sescousse et al, 2013) Changing such valuation patterns could be key in enabling people to overcome unhealthy behaviors triggered by external stimuli (Wisotsky and Swencionis, 2003; Root et al, 2009; Rupprecht et al, 2015). Many studies have been conducted to test whether stopping/withholding a response can lead
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