Preference for rewards that follow greater effort and greater delay

Alessandri, Jérôme; Darcheville, Jean-Claude; Delevoye-Turrell, Yvonne; Zentall, Thomas R.

doi:10.3758/lb.36.4.352

Cited by 54 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Some studies have examined the relation between the delay of reinforcement in prior events and the following stimuli (Alessandri, Darcheville, Delevoye-Turrell, & Zentall, 2008;DiGian et al, 2004). These studies reported that when participants were given a choice between the S+ that followed a delay and the S+ that followed no delay, they showed a significant preference for the delayed as compared to the not-delayed S+.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, the experimental paradigm of Clement et al (2000) has been used with humans. Studies have shown a significant preference for the stimuli that follow the more effortful task (Alessandri, Darcheville, Delevoye-Turrell, & Zentall, 2008;Klein, Bhatt, & Zentall, 2005).…”

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“…Alessandri, Darcheville, Delevoye-Turrell, and Zentall (2008) presented two tasks that consisted of various combinations of force (high vs. low force) and time (1 vs. 5 s) simultaneously. They assessed the participants' preferences for the tasks before the training by instructing them to choose a task according to their preference.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Effects of effort and difficulty on human preference for a stimulus: Investigation of the within-trial contrast

2016

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The within-trial contrast hypothesis (WTC) provides a more parsimonious explanation for the phenomenon that humans and animals prefer outcomes that follow more effortful events to outcomes that follow less effortful events (Zentall, 2013). We conducted two WTC experiments with human adults. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the difficulty of a preceding event by varying the interresponse time and the limited-hold interval during differential reinforcement with a low response rate schedule, to examine the effect of effort on the preference for the subsequent stimuli. In Experiment 2, we attempted to identify the variables that had affected the results of Experiment 1, by manipulating time as the delay of reinforcement. The results showed preferences based on WTC only when participants made a high rate of incorrect responses in the preceding event, which was used as an index of the strength of individual effort. These results extend the findings of previous human WTC studies and suggest that the difficulty of a task could serve as an aversive event that affects the WTC effect. It is possible that an index based on performance in the preceding event would provide useful information for predicting the contrast effect.

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Effects of effort and difficulty on human preference for a stimulus: Investigation of the within-trial contrast

2016

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“…A different approach to equating trial duration was demonstrated with human subjects by Alessandri, Darcheville, Delevoye-Turrell, and Zentall (2008). Instead of using number of mouse clicks as the differential initial event, we used pressure on a transducer.…”

Section: Figure 11 For Each Pigeon Probe Trial Preference For the Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Animals prefer reinforcement that follows greater effort: Justification of effort or within-trial contrast?

Zentall¹

2013

CCBR

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Justification of effort by humans is a form of reducing cognitive dissonance by enhancing the value of rewards when they are more difficult to obtain. Presumably, assigning greater value to rewards provides justification for the greater effort needed to obtain them. We have found such effects in adult humans and children with a highly controlled laboratory task. More importantly, under various conditions we have found similar effects in pigeons, animals not typically thought to need to justify their behavior to themselves or others. To account for these results, we have proposed a mechanism based on within-trial contrast between the end of the effort and the reinforcement (or the signal for reinforcement) that follows. This model predicts that any relatively aversive event can serve to enhance the value of the reward that follows it, simply through the contrast between those two events. In support of this general model, we have found this effect in pigeons when the prior event consists of: (a) more rather than less effort (pecking), (b) a long rather than a short delay, and (c) the absence of food rather than food. We also show that within-trial contrast can occur in the absence of relative delay reduction theory. Contrast of this kind may also play a role in other social psychological phenomena that have been interpreted in terms of cognitive dissonance. Keywords: cognitive dissonance, justification of effort, contrast, delay reduction When humans behave in a way that is inconsistent with the way they think they should behave, they will often try to justify their behavior by altering their beliefs. The theory on which this behavior is based is known as cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957). Evidence for the attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance comes from the classic study by Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) who found that subjects, who were given a small reward for agreeing to tell a prospective subject that a boring task was interesting, then rated the task more interesting than subjects who were given a large reward. Presumably, those given a small reward could not

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“…Because nucleus accumbens DA signaling has been posited to reflect incentive salience attributed to the value of stimuli (Berridge, 2007), it may be that increased DA release to longer delayed rewards reflects the findings that rewards are perceived as more valuable after a greater cost has been endured to obtain them (Alessandri et al, 2008). However, this interpretation does not explain why the DA signal to reward dynamically responded only to increases in delay, not to increases in effort.…”

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Dopaminergic Signaling in Cost-Benefit Analyses: A Matter of Time, Effort, or Uncertainty?

Covey¹,

Howard²

2011

J. Neurosci.

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Review of Wanat et al.Adaptive choice relies on valuation of commodities and behaviors in terms of their rewarding properties and cost of acquisition. The ability to monitor electrical and chemical signals within the brain while animals behave and respond to their environment offers a unique opportunity for understanding how the brain assesses value in terms of cost and expected return during decision making processes. Indeed, extensive research monitoring the electrical activity of dopamine (DA) neurons in awake monkeys during Pavlovian conditioning tasks implicates mesolimbic DA transmission in generating teaching signals involved in reward prediction (Schultz, 2010). Specifically, the firing of midbrain DA neurons appears to encode reward prediction errors: a better-thanexpected reward (positive prediction error) increases the firing rate, a fully predicted reward elicits no change, and a worse-than-expected reward (negative prediction error) reduces firing rate (Schultz et al., 1997). Moreover, DA neurons respond proportionally to cues that indicate the probability, magnitude, and delay of future rewards, with expected, large, and immediate rewards eliciting the greatest response (Schultz, 2010). Thus, DA neurons appear to encode the subjective value of anticipated rewards in response to a predictive stimulus.In addition to reward prediction, DA acting in the nucleus accumbens is implicated in assessing the cost of seeking rewards. More specifically, interfering with accumbens DA transmission through pharmacological or surgical manipulations makes rats appear less willing to trade high levels of work (i.e., cost) for reward (Salamone et al., 2009). However, these techniques generally lack the temporal precision to elucidate how DA neurons dynamically signal expected reward magnitude and future costs, both of which influence the subjective valuation of rewards and behavior. Real-time measurements of DA neurotransmission, on the other hand, offer the ability to relate DA transmission to these specific aspects of the decision-making process.In a recent issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, Wanat et al. (2010) investigated how the DA system encodes rewards associated with escalating costs by monitoring DA concentrations in rat nucleus accumbens with fast-scan cyclic voltammetry while the animals performed instrumental tasks (Wanat et al., 2010). Rats were trained to press a lever to receive a reward on both a fixed ratio (FR)4 and a progressive ratio (PR) schedule. The response cost of the reward was always four lever presses on the FR4 schedule, whereas it gradually increased throughout each session on the PR schedule. For both schedules, the same cue light signaled the availability of reward, which was always a single food pellet. Thus, response cost was the only difference between groups. Nucleus accumbens DA concentrations were assessed during the periods immediately following cue onset and reward delivery.As expected, rats completed all trials in the low effort FR4 sessions. An analysis of the last, uncompl...

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Preference for rewards that follow greater effort and greater delay

Cited by 54 publications

References 24 publications

Effects of effort and difficulty on human preference for a stimulus: Investigation of the within-trial contrast

Effects of effort and difficulty on human preference for a stimulus: Investigation of the within-trial contrast

Animals prefer reinforcement that follows greater effort: Justification of effort or within-trial contrast?

Dopaminergic Signaling in Cost-Benefit Analyses: A Matter of Time, Effort, or Uncertainty?

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