This new research suggests that our brains prioritize actions based on rewards, not habits, challenging the idea that technology simply “steals” our attention. This reward-driven attention helps explain why digital technology is so engaging; it taps into our natural preference for immediate, valuable rewards. Understanding how we choose actions at the moment could inform future studies on long-term planning, especially for actions tied to personal values.
We often blame our phones for bombarding us with information and distracting us. But in fact, it’s our own brains that are more deeply involved in this process, as new research from the University of Copenhagen and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance shows.
It turns out that when we use our phones, they’re activating our reward system, a natural part of our brain that drives us to seek out pleasurable experiences. Technology companies like Google and Facebook are aware of this process and take advantage of it to capture our attention by offering content that rewards us, whether it’s the feeling of pleasure when seeing something interesting or the satisfaction of receiving a notification.
However, this new research has revealed something interesting: our attention, contrary to what many people think, works very well. Our brain can focus and shift attention to what interests us most at the moment, and this is guided by the rewards it finds most attractive.
This means that, even when there is a lot of information competing for our attention, our brain can choose what it finds most important, which can be determined by the pleasure or reward we expect to gain from that choice.
Traditionally, scientists have used something called the “Posner cue paradigm” to study attention. Imagine you’re in a room and someone points to a specific place, suggesting that you look there. This cue (or suggestion) helps you shift your attention to that place. That’s the basic concept of this paradigm: a single cue guides your attention.
This study proposes something different. Instead of just one cue, they created an environment in which multiple cues compete for your attention at the same time. It’s as if you were in a room with several people pointing to different places, and you have to choose where to look.
This new model is closer to reality, where in everyday life we are constantly surrounded by multiple distractions (such as notifications on our phones, sounds, people talking, etc.).
The researchers demonstrated that our attention span is limited — we can’t focus on everything at once. So our brains have to decide which cue or suggestion to follow, based on its relevance or importance.
This “biased competition” means that the brain will choose the option that offers the greatest reward or the one it deems most advantageous. For example, if you are working and your phone vibrates, your brain may judge that the notification on your phone has more immediate value (such as an important message), so it diverts your attention from your work.
To explain how we make these choices, the researchers used a mathematical model called the “Intention Selection Model” (ISM). This model helps us understand how our brain selects an action from among several available options, taking into account the rewards associated with each one.
They designed an experiment where participants had to choose where to direct their attention, with several options competing at the same time. In the experiments, the choices were represented by a series of boxes on a computer screen, which could contain between 1 and 9 dots.
Each box was associated with a corner of the screen where a random letter was displayed. The task was then to report one of the letters and, in doing so, earn the points indicated by the box.
The Figure shows. Associations between cue boxes and location of stimulus letters in the multiple cue paradigm. Note: The stimulus letters are briefly presented in the corners of an imaginary rectangle. Each cue box (white boxes) is associated with a shift of attention (response set) to an associated corner (arrows) to report a letter. A shift of attention (response set) becomes relevant for execution if it is assigned a reward value greater than zero (digits inside the cue boxes and solid arrows). doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001194
Participants in the experiments were presented with four boxes at once and had to quickly shift their attention to one of the possibilities. They marked the shift of attention by entering a letter, which was presented in the corner of the screen. The process had to be repeated thousands of times for each participant so that we could be sure that it was not a matter of chance.
The study found that when faced with multiple things to pay attention to, our brains make a selection based on which of those options will bring us the most reward. This explains why, for example, we might stop what we’re doing to look at our phone when we get a notification because our brain knows there’s a reward there, like an interesting message or a news story we want to see.
Optimal attention shift selection probability as a function of relative rewardNote. Optimal attention shift selection probability as a function of relative reward according to the two-step account (red/dark) and MIS (green/light). MIS = intention selection model
Practical applications: This new research paradigm helps us understand how the brain retrieves information and how it acts in choice situations. This can give us new insights into how we make decisions in everyday situations, especially when we are surrounded by multiple digital distractions.
It also helps us understand how the brain performs habitual actions (like mindlessly checking your phone) and goal-directed actions (like deciding not to look at your phone to stay focused on work).
In short, this new paradigm allows us to study how our brain deals with multiple distractions at the same time, choosing where to focus based on the rewards associated with each option. It also helps us better understand how we make choices in a world full of stimuli and information.
READ MORE:
Testing Biased Competition Between Attention Shifts: The New Multiple Cue Paradigm
Franziska Oren, Søren Kyllingsbæk , Dawa Dupont, Thor Grünbaum
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 50(7), 655–682. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001194
Abstract:
While the classic Posner cuing paradigm has been used to study the cuing of a single endogenous shift of attention, we present a new multiple cue paradigm to study the competition between multiple endogenous shifts of attention. The new paradigm enables us to manipulate the number of competing attention shifts and their relative importance. In three experiments, we demonstrate that the process of selecting one among other relevant attention shifts is governed by limited capacity and biased competition. We show that the probability of performing the most optimal attention shift is influenced by the total number of attention shifts competing for execution and that reward is a determining factor for the selection between attention shifts. We explain our results with a recent mathematical model of biased selection of response sets (the model of intention selection [MIS]). Our new paradigm offers a critical test of MIS and is an important new tool for investigating the mechanisms underlying the retrieval of response sets from long-term memory (LTM). The model (MIS) and the new multiple cue paradigm can provide a new perspective on LTM representations of response sets for instrumental action and on habitual and goal-directed processing in action control.
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