Rewarding and aversive outcomes have opposing effects on behavior, facilitating approach and avoidance, although we need to accurately anticipate each type of outcome to behave effectively. Attention is biased toward stimuli that have been learned to predict either type of outcome, and it remains an open question whether such orienting is driven by separate systems for value- and threat-based orienting or whether there exists a common underlying mechanism of attentional control driven by motivational salience. Here, we provide a direct comparison of the neural correlates of value- and threat-based attentional capture after associative learning. Across multiple measures of behavior and brain activation, our findings overwhelmingly support a motivational salience account of the control of attention. We conclude that there exists a core mechanism of experience-dependent attentional control driven by motivational salience and that prior characterizations of attention as being value driven or supporting threat monitoring need to be revisited.

奖励和厌恶结果对行为产生相反的影响，促进接近和回避，尽管我们需要准确地预测每种类型的结果才能有效地表现。注意力偏向于已经学会预测任何一种结果的刺激，这种定向是否由基于价值和威胁的定向的不同系统驱动，或者是否存在共同的潜在的注意力控制机制，仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。通过动机显着性。在这里，我们对关联学习后基于价值和威胁的注意力捕获的神经相关性进行了直接比较。通过对行为和大脑激活的多项测量，我们的研究结果绝大多数支持对注意力控制的动机显着性说明。