How Learning and Motivational Shifts Determine the Incentive Salience of Reward Cues: a Human Behavioral Perspective
type: CreativeWork
description: Reward cues acquire distinctive incentive properties from their association with motivationally significant outcomes. These incentive properties are manifest in an augmented salience that provides reward cues with the capacity to attract attention, also in contexts where pursuing the reward is not relevant. I will first examine the unresolved debate concerning the learning parameters that define the cue-reward association and eventually modulate attention. Specifically, whether the cue attentional salience is governed by reward expectancy or uncertainty. I will then study another incentive property of reward cues, that is the ability to strengthen the performance of a separately learned instrumental action exerted to obtain an outcome, a phenomenon known as Pavlovian-Instrumental transfer (PIT). Since the motivational value of reward is altered when reward is devalued, an interesting question is whether the incentive properties of reward cues change accordingly, both in the attentional and in the operant domain. Therefore, I will investigate the effects of motivational shifts on the incentive properties of reward cues, by means of reward devaluation. In the context of the ability of a cue attentional salience to update in accordance with the altered outcome value, I will further analyze the influence of incentive learning (i.e. the possibility to re-associate the cue with the devalued outcome). The procedures adopted through the experiments share two main phases: a learning phase in which human thirsty participants learned cue-beverage reward associations involving different contingencies, and a test phase in which no reward was delivered. During the learning phase, participants accumulated the beverage reward that acted as an incentive, since it was not consumed through this phase. This allowed a controlled devaluation procedure by consummatory satiation (i.e. a motivational shift) that was administered at different moments during the experiments depending of the h…
abstract: Reward cues acquire distinctive incentive properties from their association with motivationally significant outcomes. These incentive properties are manifest in an augmented salience that provides reward cues with the capacity to attract attention, also in contexts where pursuing the reward is not relevant. I will first examine the unresolved debate concerning the learning parameters that define the cue-reward association and eventually modulate attention. Specifically, whether the cue attentional salience is governed by reward expectancy or uncertainty. I will then study another incentive property of reward cues, that is the ability to strengthen the performance of a separately learned instrumental action exerted to obtain an outcome, a phenomenon known as Pavlovian-Instrumental transfer (PIT). Since the motivational value of reward is altered when reward is devalued, an interesting question is whether the incentive properties of reward cues change accordingly, both in the attentional and in the operant domain. Therefore, I will investigate the effects of motivational shifts on the incentive properties of reward cues, by means of reward devaluation. In the context of the ability of a cue attentional salience to update in accordance with the altered outcome value, I will further analyze the influence of incentive learning (i.e. the possibility to re-associate the cue with the devalued outcome). The procedures adopted through the experiments share two main phases: a learning phase in which human thirsty participants learned cue-beverage reward associations involving different contingencies, and a test phase in which no reward was delivered. During the learning phase, participants accumulated the beverage reward that acted as an incentive, since it was not consumed through this phase. This allowed a controlled devaluation procedure by consummatory satiation (i.e. a motivational shift) that was administered at different moments during the experiments depending of the h…
author: De Tommaso, Matteo
language: eng
keywords: Settore M-PSI/01 - Psicologia Generale
date published: 2017
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:04:40Z
provider: Università degli Studi di Trento
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Università degli studi di Trento

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/11572/368441

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.15168/11572_368441