Crucially, when subjects' choices were compatible with long-run consequences, value signals in AC were down-weighted and those in vmPFC were enhanced, while the opposite occurred when choice was impulsive.
Were costs and consequences valued credibly?
We hypothesized that consequence value would induce mild anxiety, which would focus attention and facilitate learning, and that text difficulty would moderate the influence of consequence value.
The present study investigated how consequence value influences affect, attention, and learning while reading instructional texts, and if text difficulty moderates these effects.
Participants studied four instructional texts on research methods in a 2 × 2 consequence value (high vs. low) × text difficulty (easy vs. difficult) within-subjects experiment.
Partially consistent with the predictions, high consequence value led to lower valence, higher arousal, longer reading times, and positively predicted knowledge transfer.
Arousal mediated the relationship between consequence value and knowledge transfer, but only when the texts were difficult, thereby suggesting moderated mediation.
Consequence value was manipulated by assigning two of the four texts as having high value and the other two as having low value with respect to a performance goal on a subsequent test, while text difficulty was manipulated via experimenter-created easy and difficult versions of the texts.
These are: 1. unique identifier of threat (threat number), 2. textual description of threat or unwanted incidence, 3. consequence value, 4. likelihood value, 5. risk value (as a product of consequence and likelihood), 6. any other comments from the brainstorming (including ideas for risk treatment).
First, three coders independently identified attributes, consequences and values and the links between them in each respondent's transcript.
