Abstract
How we direct attention to stimuli in our environment reflects, in part, the value we associate with these stimuli (Anderson et al., 2011). When stimuli serve as predictive signals for reward or punishment, they become prioritized by the attention system. We wondered whether one’s experience associating stimuli with the need to exert effort would recruit this same learning-dependent mechanism, and if so, whether one would be biased to direct their attention toward a stimulus associated with high effort (aversive stimulus) or relatively low effort (negative reinforcement). In one experiment (N=44), participants searched for a color-defined target (red or green circle) among differently colored non-target circles. On each trial, after reporting the target, they were required to squeeze a dynamometer (hand grip device) across conditions of high- or low-effort, and critically, each level of effort was linked to a target color. In a subsequent test phase, the search task changed to a search for the unique shape in the array while non-targets were occasionally rendered in the color of one of the effort-associated targets from training (critical distractor). Analysis of response times (RTs) showed that participants were slower to report the target in the training phase when it was associated with high effort, possibly reflecting a reluctance to initiate the corresponding grip requirement. Importantly, there was a main effect of the distractor condition in the test phase, driven by a slowing of responses by the high-effort distractor relative to distractor-absent trials. RT in the low-effort distractor condition was intermediately impacted, differing from neither of the other two conditions statistically. In an ongoing study, we seek to replicate this effect using a paradigm in which stimuli previously associated with high- and low-effort directly compete for attention on some trials, potentially providing a more sensitive measure of differential effort-based attentional priority.