Interactions between reward and threat during visual processing

Appetitive stimuli such as monetary incentives often improve performance whereas aversive stimuli such as task-irrelevant negative stimuli frequently impair performance. But our understanding of how appetitive and aversive processes simultaneously contribute to brain and behavior is rudimentary. In the current fMRI study, we investigated interactions between reward and threat by investigating the effects of monetary reward on the processing of task-irrelevant threat stimuli during a visual discrimination task. Reward was manipulated by linking fast and accurate responses to foreground stimuli with monetary reward; threat was manipulated by pairing the background context with mild aversive shock. The behavioral results in terms of both accuracy and reaction time revealed that monetary reward eliminated the influence of threat-related stimuli. Paralleling the behavioral results, during trials involving both reward and threat, the imaging data revealed increased engagement of the ventral caudate and anterior mid-cingulate cortex, which were accompanied by increased task-relevant processing in the visual cortex. Overall, our study illustrates how the simultaneous processing of appetitive and aversive information shapes both behavior and brain responses.