Recent research suggests that extrinsic rewards promote memory consolidation through dopaminergic modulation processes. However, no conclusive behavioral evidence exists given that the influence of extrinsic reward on attention and motivation during encoding and consolidation processes are inherently confounded. The present study provides behavioral evidence that extrinsic rewards (i.e., monetary incentives) enhance human memory consolidation independently of attention and motivation. Participants saw neutral pictures, followed by a reward or control cue in an unrelated context. Our results (and a direct replication study) demonstrated that the reward cue predicted a retrograde enhancement of memory for the preceding neutral pictures. This retrograde effect was observed only after a delay, not immediately upon testing. An additional experiment showed that emotional arousal or unconscious resource mobilization cannot explain the retrograde enhancement effect. These results provide support for the notion that the dopaminergic memory consolidation effect can result from extrinsic reward.

Despite the voluminous empirical research on the harmful effects of extrinsic incentives (e.g., money, competition prizes, etc.) on people's intrinsic motivation ("undermining effect"), our society is still reliant upon the use of extrinsic incentives to motivate people. To better understand the reason underlying this theory-practice gap, the current study examined people's beliefs about how extrinsic incentives influence recipients' intrinsic motivation. Participants were presented with a description of a previous experiment which demonstrated the undermining effect, and were asked to make a prediction about the results of the experiment. The findings showed that the majority of participants firmly, but wrongly believed in the beneficial effects of reward on intrinsic motivation and did so with greater confidence. This inaccurate belief about motivation may play a role in the current, frequent use of extrinsic incentives in our society, and the current study suggests the importance of targeting stakeholders' beliefs in intervention research.

The verbal overshadowing effect is the phenomenon in which describing a previously seen face impairs its recognition (Schooler and Engstler-Schooler, 1990). The primary purpose of this research was to investigate how the similarity between a target and distractors influences verbal overshadowing. In order to manipulate test-set similarity, we blended the faces of different people by using morphing techniques. As a result, verbal overshadowing was found when test-set similarity was relatively high, while the effect was not evident when there was a lesser degree of similarity. The results suggest that replicating the emergence of the verbal overshadowing effect depends on test-set similarity. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.In criminal investigations, obtaining a thorough description of the perpetrator of a crime is often crucial to the investigation, because it is believed to assist officers in quickly identifying and apprehending a suspect . Do such descriptions really assist in the identification of a suspect? Recent research suggests, on the contrary, that such descriptions can disrupt subsequent identification performance. For example, Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) initially showed participants a video of a bank robbery for 30 s, and subsequently directed half of the participants to describe the appearance of the robber and the other half to complete a filler activity. All the participants were then given a recognition test that included photos of the target face and seven distractor faces of similar appearance. The participants who had described the face were less accurate in choosing the target face than the participants who had not described it; that is, a verbal description impaired the subsequent identification of a target face. They termed this phenomenon verbal overshadowing.Since Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) discovered that verbalization disrupted subsequent face recognition, a number of studies have replicated their results (Ryan and Schooler,

In the present study, we investigated how brain images affect metacomprehension judgments of neuroscience research. Participants made a prereading judgment of comprehension of the text topic and then read a text about neuroimaging findings. In Experiment 1, participants read text only or text accompanying brain images. In Experiment 2, participants read text accompanying bar graphs or text accompanying brain images. Then participants were asked to rate their comprehension of the text. Finally, they completed comprehension tests. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the text accompanying brain images was associated with higher metacomprehension judgments than was the text only, whereas the performance of the comprehension test did not differ between each condition. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the text accompanying brain images was associated not only with credibility of the text, but also with higher metacomprehension judgments than was the text accompanying the bar graphs, whereas the performance of the comprehension test did not differ between each condition. The findings suggest that the readers' subjective judgments differ from actual comprehension.