Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 139, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 104-110
Acta Psychologica

Manipulations of attention enhance self-regulation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.09.010Get rights and content

Abstract

Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emerging evidence suggests that attention may mediate such acts, but little is known about the specific operations through which attention might influence self-regulation. Here we test this often-implicit assumption by manipulating attention mechanisms in two ways: one controlling the inhibition of inappropriate responses; the other controlling the breadth of attention. Participants significantly improved their performance on a self-regulation task after practice on a response inhibition task (Experiment 1) and after the induction of a broad focus of attention in a visual discrimination task (Experiment 2). We propose that such manipulations enhance self-regulation by engaging mechanisms that enhance the salience of goal-related representations and reduce the activation of competing goal-irrelevant neural representations. By more efficiently resolving conflict among the signals vying to drive behavior, pre-engaging attention may also help to conserve resources needed for continued self-regulation.

Highlights

► We examined the influence of attentional manipulation on self-regulation. ► Broadening the scope of attention improves self-regulation. ► Practicing response inhibition improves self-regulation. ► Efficient attentional processing frees up mental resources for self-regulation.

Introduction

Self-regulation is the capacity to override impulses and modify one's behavior (Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996). Examples of self-regulation behaviors range from persisting on a difficult task to resisting delicious yet fattening food when on a diet. Failure to self-regulate has maladaptive consequences, including drug abuse, obesity, and academic underachievement (Muraven, Collins, & Nienhaus, 2002). Self-regulation is typically described in abstract terms regarding the application of willpower or balancing the cost of short-term gratification against the benefit of achieving long-term goals. Emerging evidence, however, suggests that attention may provide specific cognitive mechanisms that mediate self-regulation (e.g., Baumeister and Heatherton, 1996, Rueda et al., 2005).

The need to self-regulate arises from the fact that there are a variety of brain signals that continuously compete to determine the focus of our thoughts and behavior. Activity in brain regions such as the ventral striatum and ventral-medial prefrontal cortex, for example, increases with the potential reward associated with a particular stimulus or response option (Botvinick, Huffstetler, & McGuire, 2009). As this reward-related activity increases, so does the likelihood that behavior will be directed toward the associated stimulus (Ikemoto & Panksepp, 1999). Meanwhile, activity in other brain regions, such as areas of the dorsal anterior cingulate and dorsal striatum, varies with the anticipated effort and other costs associated with the pursuit of such a stimulus (Kurniawan et al., 2010). Importantly, such competing neural representations have been shown to have mutually suppressive effects. As the relative salience of potential reward increases, activity associated with effort and cost decreases (Walton, Kennerley, Bannerman, Phillips, & Rushworth, 2006). Thus, any cognitive mechanism that can enhance the strength of a behavioral signal can effectively bias the competition in its favor, making it more likely to ultimately guide behavior.

Attention is a leading candidate for this role. Strategic, goal-directed neural signals associated with attention originate in regions such as lateral prefrontal cortex and act to bias the competition in other brain regions to favor task-relevant representations (Desimone & Duncan, 1995). As the goal-relevant neural activity is thereby enhanced, activity related to distracting and potentially conflicting representations is reduced (Kastner and Ungerleider, 2000, Tsotsos et al., 1995). While such effects of attention have been most thoroughly established in the sensory and perceptual domain, the same principles of biased competition apply not just to neural representations of external stimuli, but also to internal mental representations and thought processes (Chun, Golumb, & Turk-Browne, 2011). We take this as a clear support for the notion that attentional biasing is instrumental in mediating the success of self-regulatory efforts.

Indeed self-regulation involves focusing on accomplishing a goal behavior while overriding competing urges (Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996). It can only be successful if representations relevant to maintaining the strategic goal win the neural competition over those that would otherwise undermine self-regulatory efforts. A dieter, for example, must discount salient but maladaptive cues, such as the delicious aroma of their favorite chocolate cake, in favor of thoughts about their improved health and appearance. Biasing the competition between these conflicting signals in favor of strategic goals can therefore increase the likelihood that adaptive cues guide behavior. This may explain why focusing an individual's attention on the health aspects of food choices improves dietary choice (Hare, Malmaud, & Rangel, 2011). Neuroimaging data obtained during these choices suggest that such improvements result from attention-related activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex modulating stimulus-value signals in ventral-medial prefrontal cortex.

Other observations support the link between attention and self-regulation. The development of attentional neural systems is correlated with the capacity for self-regulation (Rueda et al., 2005), whereas limited attentional abilities are associated with self-regulation failures. For example, adolescents with attention dysfunction are at risk for substance dependence (Tapert, Baratta, Abrantes, & Brown, 2002). Furthermore, activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which engages attentional control mechanisms, interacts with brain structures involved in evaluating the emotional–motivational significance of stimuli, including the insular cortex, amygdala, and ventral striatum. This integration of emotionally significant signals with attentional control signals in prefrontal cortex thus facilitates emotional regulation, one of the processes involved in successful self-regulation (Pessoa, 2009). These findings provide evidence for the general notion that the effective allocation of attention plays an important role in successful self-regulation. However, very little is known about the specific cognitive operations through which attention may mediate self-regulation.

Here, we investigate the role of two specific attention mechanisms that we propose is instrumental in biasing neural competition in a manner that is adaptive for self-regulation: response inhibition and changing the scope of attention. Inhibition diminishes the contribution of goal-irrelevant information to behavior and primes the suppression of inappropriate responses, while broadening the focus of attention allows for greater cognitive flexibility than a narrow focus locked on salient but potentially maladaptive information.

Clearly, successful self-regulation entails the ability to suppress actions that arise from maladaptive impulses (Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996). For example, when a dieter with a sweet tooth is presented with chocolate cake, they will have to stop themselves from picking up the fork. Suppression of salient urges is also required to persist in unpleasant tasks: when exercising on a treadmill, a novice runner will have to resist the impulse to stop running when the first signs of fatigue set in. Empirical evidence for a link between attentional inhibition and successful self-regulation comes from the finding that individuals with stronger inhibitory control skills are more likely to avoid making socially-inappropriate actions and are less likely to give in to temptation (Hofmann et al., 2009, von Hippel and Gonsalkorale, 2005).

Inhibition of distracting or task-irrelevant information and responses is an integral part of attention and is critical for any kind of goal-directed behavior. Although the bulk of empirical studies on attention is limited to sensory domains (e.g., vision or audition), attention is in fact intricately linked to planning and execution of overt actions (i.e., motor responses; Colby and Goldberg, 1999, Schneider and Deubel, 2002). For example, visuospatial shifts of attention are preceded by activation in neural areas that control eye movements (Goldberg and Wurtz, 1972, Kustov and Robinson, 1996). Likewise, attentional facilitation of visual processing is thought to occur via feedback connections between regions of pre-motor cortex that transform spatial information into movement representations and regions of visual cortex that code stimulus information related to the resulting motor program (Rizzolatti et al., 1994; see also Craighero, Fadiga, Rizzolatti, & Umiltà, 1999). This underscores the fact that representations related to motor responses are integral in the flow of information throughout the brain. Attention biases competition between such representations at late motor stages, just as it does for representations at early sensory stages, including the activation or inhibition of responses per se (Kropotov & Etlinger, 1999). Indeed, the same attentional inhibition mechanisms that bias selection of early visual input are directly involved in the suppression of inappropriate actions (Loach, Frischen, Bruce, & Tsotsos, 2008).

In Experiment 1 we examine whether pre-engaging inhibition of goal-incongruent responses will enhance self-regulation, regardless of dispositional inhibitory control skills. Inhibiting the processing of information or responses that are detrimental to successful self-regulation thus diminishes the likelihood that maladaptive information will win the neural competition for control of action. Furthermore, engaging response inhibition processes could prime the inhibition of pre-potent responses, which is necessary for successful self-regulation, making it more effective and efficient.

Changes in the scope of attention, from a broad focus to a narrow focus and vice versa, are linked with distinct neurophysiological states that uniquely influence behavior (Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008). A broad attentional focus is associated with cognitive flexibility, which prevents maladaptive over-investment of processing resources into a salient yet detrimental factor (Olivers & Nieuwenhuis, 2005). For example, persisting in a healthy diet plan would be considerably more difficult to achieve if one were to narrow the focus attention to the delicious aroma of chocolate cake instead of broadening the focus to allow influences from other relevant factors, such as the summer dress that one bought as an incentive.

This reasoning is in line with Construal Level Theory, according to which activation of broad, high-level concepts results in better self-control than activation of narrow, low-level concerns that can conflict with the requirement to self-regulate (Fujita & Han, 2009). A recent study showed that dieters exhibited an attentional bias toward (maladaptive) food cues, but were less likely to do so when primed with diet-related concepts (Papies, Stroebe, & Aarts, 2008). We therefore expect that inducing a broad focus of attention in Experiment 2 will improve self-regulation by increasing cognitive flexibility to thereby enhance the salience of goal-related representations.

Although attention has been implicated in successful self-regulation, previous research does not allow for firm conclusions regarding a causal relationship. Cue-specific attentional-bias training has been shown to improve some measures related to self-regulation. For example, training patients with alcoholism to disengage from alcohol-related cues can decrease problematic alcohol consumption (Fadardi & Cox, 2009) and extend relapse-free time (Schoenmakers et al., 2010). However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has experimentally manipulated fundamental and cue-invariant attentional processes in an effort to directly enhance immediate self-regulation. Here, we report two experiments as a novel investigation of the role of attention in self-regulatory behavior. We predict that experience performing a task that (i) engages response inhibition, or (ii) broadens the focus of attention will subsequently facilitate performance on a task requiring self-regulation. Capacity for self-regulation was assessed before and after the attentional manipulation by measuring the length of time that participants were willing to squeeze a handgrip exerciser. This is a commonly used measure of self-regulation as it requires a great deal of effortful persistence and is unrelated to grip strength per se (e.g., Alberts et al., 2007, Ciarocco et al., 2001, Hejak, 1989, Muraven et al., 1998).

Section snippets

Experiment 1

In this experiment, we manipulated participants' practice at inhibiting inappropriate responses. Participants performed either a Go/No-go task that required them to inhibit habitual responses on a subset of trials, or a version of the same task that did not require response inhibition. It is important to note that the Go/No-go task poses different inhibitory demands than the inhibition tasks that are sometimes used to exhaust mental resources in the ego depletion paradigm of self-regulation.

Experiment 2

Attention is perhaps most well known for its effects in the visual-spatial domain. Thus, whereas Experiment 1 focused on response-based attention processes, we extend our investigation in Experiment 2 by examining how self-regulation is affected by changes in the visual-spatial scope of attention. An advantage of this manipulation is that any positive influence on self-regulation cannot be attributed solely to a direct modulation of the motoric impulse to give up. A broad focus of attention is

General discussion

Two experiments demonstrated that the capacity for self-regulation was enhanced by simple manipulations of attention. Participants improved their own self-regulation performance after recently receiving practice at inhibiting inappropriate responses (Experiment 1) or after they were induced to adopt a broad focus of attention (Experiment 2). These findings indicate a causal relationship in which mechanisms of attention influence self-regulation. That is, improving the degree to which attention

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. We are also grateful for the assistance of Karly Neath and Malynn Cowley in conducting this research.

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