Monetary and non-monetary rewards reduce attentional capture by emotional distractors

ABSTRACT

Irrelevant emotional stimuli often capture attention, disrupting ongoing cognitive processes. In two experiments, we examined whether availability of rewards (monetary and non-monetary) can prevent this attentional capture. Participants completed a central letter identification task while attempting to ignore negative, positive, and neutral distractor images that appeared above or below the targets on 25% of trials. Distraction was indexed by slowing on distractor-present trials. Half the participants completed the task with no performance-contingent reward, while the other half earned points for fast and accurate performance. In Experiment 1, points translated into monetary reward, but in Experiment 2, points had no monetary value. In both experiments, reward reduced capture by emotional distractors, showing that even non-monetary reward can aid attentional control. These findings suggest that motivation encourages use of effective cognitive control mechanisms that effectively prevent attentional capture, even when distractors are emotional.

KEYWORDS:

• Motivation
• reward
• cognitive control
• emotion
• distraction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here, the only deviation from the preregistration is that we do not present two one-sided equivalence tests (Lakens, 2013) examining whether reward similarly influenced positive and negative distraction. The tests were not conclusive in either direction and therefore did not add anything to the findings or conclusions.

Additional information

Funding

Research was supported by a grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund [grant number VUW-1307] to Gina Grimshaw and David Carmel.