Humans Integrate Monetary and Liquid Incentives to Motivate Cognitive Task Performance

Abstract

It is unequivocal that a wide variety of incentives can motivate behavior. However, few studies have explicitly examined whether and how different incentives are integrated in terms of their motivational influence. The current study examines the combined effects of monetary and liquid incentives on cognitive processing, and whether appetitive and aversive incentives have distinct influences. We introduce a novel task paradigm, in which participants perform cued task-switching for monetary rewards that vary parametrically across trials, with liquid incentives serving as post-trial performance feedback. Critically, the symbolic meaning of the liquid was held constant (indicating successful reward attainment), while liquid valence was blocked. In the first experiment, monetary rewards combined additively with appetitive liquid feedback to improve subject task performance. Aversive liquid feedback counteracted monetary reward effects in low monetary reward trials, particularly in a subset of participants who tended to avoid responding under these conditions. Self-report motivation ratings predicted behavioral performance above and beyond experimental effects. A follow-up experiment replicated the predictive power of motivation ratings even when only appetitive liquids were used, suggesting that ratings reflect idiosyncratic subjective values of, rather than categorical differences between, the liquid incentives. Together, the findings indicate an integrative relationship between primary and secondary incentives and potentially dissociable influences in modulating motivational value, while informing hypotheses regarding candidate neural mechanisms.

Age-Related Differences in Motivational Integration and Cognitive Control

“…In younger adults, we clearly replicated findings from Yee et al (2016), observing both main effects monetary reward and liquid valence on reward rate. We also replicated other previous findings in which self-reported motivation and liking ratings predicted variance in reward rate over and above the experimental factors.…”

“…The supplement contains detailed statistical analyses of these ratings, which demonstrate that older adults indeed discriminated between and show transitive preferences for the different liquids. Additionally, as previously shown in the Yee et al (2016) study, self-report motivation ratings predicted unique variance over and above experimentally manipulated motivational variables for both older and younger adults [older: χ 2 (1,9) = 5.132, p = 0.023; older: χ 2 (1,9) = 82.401, p < 0.001].…”

“…We introduce an innovative and powerful new experimental paradigm to probe the following outstanding question: how is the interaction between motivational integration and cognitive control affected by healthy aging? Recent evidence has revealed that healthy young adults appear to integrate the motivational value of primary and secondary incentives to modulate cognitive control task performance (Yee, Krug, Allen, & Braver, 2016). In particular, the use of proactive cognitive control-the ability to actively maintain contextual information, such as task instructions or relevant information conveyed by task cues-is encouraged through the use of a cued task-switching paradigm, in which advance task cues, which randomly vary between the two tasks, enable preparation for the upcoming trial.…”

“…The behavioral task used in the study is identical to the cued task-switching paradigm from Yee et al (2016). Participants performed the consonant-vowel odd-even (CVOE) switching task (Rogers & Monsell, 1995;Minear & Shah, 2008), which entailed being presented with a letter-number pair (one letter and one number) and then asked to categorize the target symbol based on the assigned task in each trial-the letter as either a vowel or a consonant, or the number as odd or even.…”

Motivated Cognition: Effects of Reward, Emotion, and Other Motivational Factors Across a Variety of Cognitive Domains

“…Rather than examining these different rewards in isolation, a subset of studies have taken the approach of comparing their effects, or putting them in conflict. For instance, some studies have examined the motivational effects of monetary reward alongside another reward-related stimuli type, such as an appetitive juice reinforcer (Beck et al, 2010;Krug & Braver, 2014;Yee et al, 2016) or pain induction (Delgado et al, 2011;Murty et al, 2011;Read & Loewenstein, 1999;Talmi et al, 2009;Vlaev et al, 2014Vlaev et al, , 2009Zhou & Gao, 2008). Other studies use what could be broadly considered a social reward, such as smiling face (Lin et al, 2012), indicator of social status (Izuma et al, 2008;Zink et al, 2008), or erotic pictures (Iigaya et al, 2016;Sescousse et al, 2013a, b).…”