Valuation of Go Stimuli or Devaluation of No-Go Stimuli? Evidence of an Increased Preference for Attended Go Stimuli Following a Go/No-Go Task

Kazuya Inoue,Nobuya Sato

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00474

Abstract

Attentional inhibition that occurs during discrimination tasks leads to the negative evaluation of distractor stimuli. This phenomenon, known as the distractor devaluation effect also occurs when go/no-go tasks require response inhibition. However, it remains unclear whether there are interactions between attention and response controls when the distractor devaluation effect occurs. The aims of this study were to investigate whether attention to stimuli in the go/no-go task plays a facilitative role in distractor devaluation through response inhibition, and to clarify whether this effect reflects a decreased preference for no-go stimuli. Participants evaluated the preference for pictures before and after a go/no-go task. In Experiments 1 and 2, they made a go or no-go response depending on the category of pictures displayed (gummy candies or rice crackers), whereas in Experiment 3 they did on the basis digit category, even or odd numbers, superimposed on such pictures. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that the pictures presented as no-go stimuli in the preceding go/no-go task were evaluated as less positive than the pictures presented as go stimuli. This devaluation effect reflected an increased preference for the go stimuli but not a decreased preference for the no-go stimuli. Experiment 3 indicated that response inhibition did not affect the preference for the pictures that had not received attention in a preceding go/no-go task. These results suggest that although attention plays an important role in differential ratings for go and no-go stimuli, such differences, in fact, reflect the valuation of go stimuli.

Highlights

One’s evaluation of the emotional value of objects appears to be influenced by ways in which an individual interacts with certain objects
The aim of the present study was to investigate whether attention plays an important role in emotional devaluation through response inhibition
Asterisks indicate significant differences (∗p < 0.05, ∗∗p < 0.01). These results suggest that the emotional devaluation of the no-go stimuli occurred through response inhibition (Kiss et al, 2008; Doallo et al, 2012)

Summary

Introduction

One’s evaluation of the emotional value of objects appears to be influenced by ways in which an individual interacts with certain objects. People tend to prefer objects that are repeatedly encountered relative to novel (i.e., unexposed) ones This preferential bias has been labeled as the mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968). The results showed that the stimuli previously rejected as distractors were subsequently evaluated more negatively than the stimuli selected as target and the novel stimuli This emotional devaluation of the distractor stimuli, called the distractor devaluation effect (Raymond et al, 2003), is a robust phenomenon that has been observed in various experimental paradigms, such as in a visual search task (Fenske et al, 2004; Raymond et al, 2005), rapid serial visual presentation task (Kihara et al, 2011), and flanker task (Martiny-Huenger et al, 2014). This effect has been replicated using a wide range of stimuli such as geometric figures (Veling et al, 2008), line drawings (Griffiths and Mitchell, 2008), and human faces (Fenske et al, 2005)

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