Goal-Directed Recruitment of Pavlovian Biases Through Selective Visual Attention

Prospective outcomes bias behavior in a "Pavlovian" manner: Reward prospect invigorates action, while punishment prospect suppresses it. Theories have posited Pavlovian biases as global action "priors" in unfamiliar or uncontrollable environments. However, this account fails to explain the strength of these biases-causing frequent action slips-even in well-known environments. We propose that Pavlovian control is additionally useful if flexibly recruited by instrumental control. Specifically, instrumental action plans might shape selective attention to reward/punishment information and thus the input to Pavlovian control. In two eye-tracking samples (N = 35/64), we observed that Go/NoGo action plans influenced when and for how long participants attended to reward/punishment information, which in turn biased their responses in a Pavlovian manner. Participants with stronger attentional effects showed higher performance. Thus, humans appear to align Pavlovian control with their instrumental action plans, extending its role beyond action defaults to a powerful tool ensuring robust action execution. Public Significance Statement This study suggests that Pavlovian biases, a fast-and-frugal decision strategy that may trigger suboptimal choices in certain contexts, are not a permanent, immutable force upon behavior. Instead, they are flexibly recruited depending on the action a person is planning: Given the plan to make/withhold actions, people preferably attend to reward-/punishment-related information, which in turn triggers Pavlovian biases that facilitate the implementation of these plans. Stronger "outsourcing" of action implementation to such an attentional recruitment of Pavlovian biases leads to higher performance. These findings highlight how Pavlovian biases are more flexible than previously thought and how strong biases can be of advantage.