title: Suppressing a motivationally-triggered action tendency engages a response control mechanism that prevents future provocation.
abstract: Reward-predicting stimuli can induce maladaptive behavior by provoking action tendencies that conflict with long-term goals. Earlier, we showed that when human participants were permitted to respond for a reward in the presence of a task-irrelevant, reward-predicting stimulus (i.e. goCS+ trials), the CS+ provoked an action tendency to respond compared to when a non-rewarding CS- stimulus was present (i.e. goCS- trials). However, when participants were not permitted to respond, response suppression was recruited to mitigate the action tendency that was triggered by the motivating CS+ stimulus (i.e. on nogoCS+ trials) (Freeman et al., 2014). Here we tested the hypothesis that repeated response suppression over a motivationally-triggered action tendency would reduce subsequent CS+ provocation. We compared groups of participants who had different proportions of nogoCS+ trials, and we measured CS+ provocation on go trials via reaction time. Our results showed that CS+ provocation on go trials was reduced monotonically as the proportion of nogoCS+ trials increased. Further analysis showed that these group differences were best explained by reduced provocation on goCS+ trials that followed nogoCS+ (compared to nogoCS-) trials. Follow-up experiments using a neurophysiological index of motor activity replicated these effects and also suggested that, following nogoCS+ trials, a response suppression mechanism was in place to help prevent subsequent CS+ provocation. Thus, our results show that performing response suppression in the face of a motivating stimulus not only controls responding at that time, but also prevents provocation in the near future.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
authors.forename: Scott M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Freeman
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
authors.forename: Dominic
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Alvernaz
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
authors.forename: Alexandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tonnesen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Linderman
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. Electronic address: adamaron@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: Adam R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Aron
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003214:Conditioning, Classical / Q000502:physiology*; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation / Q000502:physiology*; D012201:Reward; D050781:Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D014163:Transfer, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cognitive control; Conflict adaptation; Motivation; Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer; Transcranial magnetic stimulation