On Thursday 15 March Tom Schonberg, University of Tel Aviv, will give a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium.

New behavioral and imaging findings on the cue-approach effect: A non-reinforced mechanism of behavior change

Tom and co-workers recently developed a manipulation named the cue-approach task to influence choices of snack food items relying on non-reinforced mechanisms. In the task, a neutral tone and a button press are repeatedly associated with specific pictures of items in a session lasting less than 1 hour. In a subsequent probe phase participants choose between pairs of items where only one of the items in each pair was previously associated with the cue and button press. Replicated results show that this training leads to preference changes favoring the previously cued item and that these changes last for up to several months. Functional MRI results show a value change signature in the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex during the choice phase. In this talk, Tom discusses new studies where they were able to change preferences towards other stimuli such as IAPS images, faces and fractals, which attest to the generality of the effect. He will discuss new imaging findings that begin revealing the putative mechanisms underlying this effect.

Salomon, T., Botvinik-Nezer, R., Gutentag, T., Gera, R., Iwanir, R., Tamir, M., & Schonberg, T. (2018). The Cue-Approach Task as a General Mechanism for Long-Term Non- Reinforced Behavioral Change. Scientific Reports, 1–13. http://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-21774-3