Biased choice and incentive salience: Implications for addiction

Before we can make any choice, we must gather information from the environment about what our options are. This information-gathering process is critically mediated by attention, and our attention is, in turn, shaped by our previous experiences with—and learning about—stimuli and their consequences. In this review we highlight studies demonstrating a rapid and automatic influence of reward learning on attentional capture, and argue that these findings provide a human analogue of sign-tracking behaviour observed in non-human animals – wherein signals of reward gain incentive salience and become attractive targets for attention (and overt behaviour) in their own right. We then consider the implications of this idea for understanding the drivers of cue-controlled behaviour, with focus on addiction as a case in which choices with regard to reward-related stimuli can become injurious to health. We argue that motivated behaviour in general—and addiction in particular—can be understood within a ‘biased competition’ framework: different options and outcomes compete for attentional priority as a function of top-down goals, bottom-up salience, and prior experience, and the winner of this competition becomes the target for subsequent outcome-directed and flexible behaviour. Finally, we outline the implications of the biased-competition framework for cognitive, behavioural, and socioeconomic interventions for addiction.