Summary: New research suggests our brains prioritize behaviors based on rewards rather than habits, challenging the idea that technology simply “steals” our attention . This study found that when presented with multiple tasks, participants consistently chose the most rewarding option, even when it conflicted with their trained habits.
This reward-driven attention helps explain why digital technologies are so attractive. It takes advantage of our natural preference for immediate and valuable rewards. Understanding how we choose to act in the moment may inform future research on long-term planning, especially for behaviors tied to personal values. Essentially, it’s our reward-seeking minds, not technology, that causes shifts in attention.
Important facts:
Reward-driven attention: People prioritize tasks that are perceived as most rewarding over habitual behaviors. The role of technology: Rather than controlling attention, digital technology leverages our natural tendency to seek rewards. Future research: Research is planned to investigate how we recall planned actions. future.
Source: University of Copenhagen
Cell phones are often blamed for drowning us in information and stealing our attention. But new research from the University of Copenhagen shows that cell phones and technology companies are actually tapping into our own internal reward systems.
We often hear that we live in an attention economy, where technology companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook present us with an overwhelming amount of fascinating information that demands our attention. Masu.
This is not wrong, but our understanding of how attention works is inaccurate. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have shown in a new study that our attention spans work surprisingly well. And it allows our brains to achieve exactly what they want most: reward.
In a series of controlled experiments just published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance article “Testing Biased Competition Between attention Shifts,” researchers investigated what makes people focus their attention on certain behaviors. Researched. When presented with different courses of action.
In the experiment, choices were represented by a series of boxes on a computer screen, holding points from 1 to 9. Each box was associated with a corner of the screen where a random letter appeared. The task was to report one of the letters and earn the points shown in the box.
“Participants in our experiment were given four boxes at a time and had to immediately shift their attention to one of the possibilities. They had to type the letters that appeared in the corner of the screen. This indicated a change in attention.
“This process had to be repeated thousands of times with each participant, so we could be confident that it was not a matter of chance,” says Thor Grünbaum, co-lead of the Cognition, Intention and Behavior Research Group. The associate professor explains. Professor Søren Killingsbeck.
“In our experiments, we found that participants primed several attentional shifts at the same time, meaning that several attentional cues competed and were executed simultaneously. By relating it to rewards, we can show that the shift associated with the highest reward usually wins.
“The experiment therefore shows that rewards are the decisive factor in determining what we notice and what we remember to act when given multiple opportunities.”
Therefore, Grünbaum and Killingsbeck also believe that it is inaccurate to talk about the digital world stealing or controlling our attention. It’s almost the opposite. This technology often takes advantage of our ability, when presented with a variety of possibilities, to precisely choose the content that will yield the greatest reward.
In other words, technology companies are exploiting our subjective values by rewarding shifts in our attention and behavior.
habits and rewards
Habits are usually thought of as something you can’t break, but here again experimentation can teach us something important.
“It tells us something about our behavior in situations where we have been trained for a particular behavior. Participants in our experiment simply moved their attention to a particular corner of the screen. I spent a lot of time learning how to connect one box.
“Once you train attention switching, it should become a habit. We find that when they are presented with four competing actions to decide on in a short amount of time, they choose the reward over the habitual action. “,” says Grünbaum.
The authors conclude that in experimental situations, the action with the highest subjective value is most likely to be selected, even if other actions have been extensively trained.
This means that a person’s values conflict with ingrained habits. Habits often succumb to competition when another behavior is more important. This insight is also worth bringing to the discussion of the attention economy.
long term plan
The next step for researchers is a project to consider how to plan for the long term. The current experiment tells us something about what activates shifts in our attention in the short term, but what happens when we try to plan future actions?
“If we decide to buy flour on our way home from work, we have to store that action in our long-term memory. What we want to understand is how do we remember what we set out to do? Especially if you’re planning several different actions, as we usually do,” says Grünbaum.
Again, Grünbaum and Killingsbeck expect us to focus our attention on the behaviors we value most. But when we’re in the real world rather than the lab, other factors come into play.
“Previous research has shown that our environment plays an important role in how we remember things. So, if you see a supermarket sign on your way home from work, your plan to buy flour is triggered. We are developing an experimental design to study the factors involved in choosing between competing plans.”
About this attention and neuroscience research news
Author: Thor Grünbaum
Source: University of Copenhagen
Contact: Thor Grünbaum – University of Copenhagen
Image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access.
“Testing Biased Competition Between Attentional Shifts: A New Multiple-Cue Paradigm” by Thor Grünbaum et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
abstract
Testing biased competition during attentional shifts: A new multiple cue paradigm.
While the classic Posner cueing paradigm has been used to study single endogenous attentional change cues, we developed a new method for studying conflicts between multiple endogenous attentional changes. We present multiple cueing paradigms.
The new paradigm allows us to manipulate the number of competing attentional shifts and their relative importance.
In three experiments, we demonstrated that the process of selecting one among other relevant attentional shifts is dominated by limited capacity and biased competition.
The probability of executing an optimal attentional shift is influenced by the total number of attentional shifts competing for execution, indicating that reward is a determinant of the choice between attentional shifts.
We explain our results using a recent mathematical model of biased selection of response sets: the intention-selection model (MIS).
Our new paradigm provides an important test of MIS and is an important new tool for investigating the mechanisms underlying response set retrieval from long-term memory (LTM).
model (MIS) and a new multiple cue paradigm can provide a new perspective on the LTM representation of the response set of instrumental actions and the habitual and goal-directed processing in action control.
