Manipulations of attention enhance self-regulation.

Journal article

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.

Authors: Hanif, A; Ferrey, A; Frischen, A; Pozzobon, K; Eastwood, J

• Journal: Acta psychologica
• Volume: 139
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 104-110
• Publication date: 2012-01-01
• DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.09.010
• EISSN: 1873-6297
• ISSN: 0001-6918
• Language: English
• Keywords: Conflict (Psychology); Female; Hand Strength; Adult; Male; Social Control, Informal; Attention; Humans; Reaction Time; Inhibition (Psychology)