The influence of monetary incentives on context processing in younger and older adults: an event-related potential study

Schmitt, Hannah; Ferdinand, Nicola K.; Kray, Jutta

doi:10.3758/s13415-015-0335-x

Cited by 36 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 81 publications

(167 reference statements)

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“…In the aging literature, although converging evidence suggests that older adults prioritize meaningful and self-relevant behavioral goals that maximize emotional satisfaction (e.g., social and emotional outcomes that benefit well-being over monetary reward or increased knowledge; Carstensen, 2006), surprisingly few studies have examined the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying how different incentive types putatively alter cognitive processes throughout the lifespan. Most studies of motivation in healthy aging have focused on the influence of monetary incentives on cognition and behavior (Harsay, Cohen, Reneman, & Ridderinkhof, 2011;Schmitt, Ferdinand, & Kray, 2015;Spaniol, Bowen, Wegier, & Grady, 2015;Spaniol, Voss, Bowen, & Grady, 2011), and have rarely considered the effects of nonmonetary or biologically relevant incentive types (e.g., primary reinforcers; Strough, Bruin, & Peters, 2015).…”

Section: Motivational Integration and Cognitive Control Interactions mentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-Related Differences in Motivational Integration and Cognitive Control

Yee

Adams

Beck

et al. 2019

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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Motivational incentives play an influential role in value-based decision-making and cognitive control. A compelling hypothesis in the literature suggests that the motivational value of diverse incentives are integrated in the brain into a common currency value signal that influences decision-making and behavior. To investigate whether motivational integration processes change during healthy aging, we tested older (N = 44) and younger (N = 54) adults in an innovative incentive integration task paradigm that establishes dissociable and additive effects of liquid (e.g., juice, neutral, saltwater) and monetary incentives on cognitive task performance. The results reveal that motivational incentives improve cognitive task performance in both older and younger adults, providing novel evidence demonstrating that age-related cognitive control deficits can be ameliorated with sufficient incentive motivation. Additional analyses revealed clear age-related differences in motivational integration. Younger adult task performance was modulated by both monetary and liquid incentives, whereas monetary reward effects were more gradual in older adults and more strongly impacted by trial-by-trial performance feedback. A surprising discovery was that older adults shifted attention from liquid valence toward monetary reward throughout task performance, but younger adults shifted attention from monetary reward toward integrating both monetary reward and liquid valence by the end of the task, suggesting differential strategic utilization of incentives. These data suggest that older adults may have impairments in incentive integration and employ different motivational strategies to improve cognitive task performance. The findings suggest potential candidate neural mechanisms that may serve as the locus of age-related change, providing targets for future cognitive neuroscience investigations.

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Section: Motivational Integration and Cognitive Control Interactions mentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-Related Differences in Motivational Integration and Cognitive Control

Yee

Adams

Beck

et al. 2019

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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“…Thus, incentive could paradoxically reduce performance, with effects presumably most evident at the highest working memory loads. Alternatively, as suggested in some of their papers, the cognitive load of the task itself may cause older adults to ignore or less completely process incentive information (Schmitt et al, 2015(Schmitt et al, , 2017. Thus, the predictions that this view would make for many of the measures in the current study are not entirely clear.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…Second, most studies have focused on measures related to attention and cognitive control (Di Rosa, Schiff, Cagnolati, & Mapelli, 2015;Schmitt, Ferdinand, & Kray, 2015;Schmitt, Kray, & Ferdinand, 2017;Williams, Biel, Dyson, & Spaniol, 2017;Williams, Kudus, Dyson, & Spaniol, 2018;Yee, Adams, Beck, & Braver, 2019), and only a handful have compared young and older adults. To our knowledge, despite well-established and large age differences in working memory, and the fundamental role working memory is thought to play in performance in many domains, only one study has examined the effects of incentive on working memory in younger and older adults (Thurm, Zink, & Li, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It does not appear to apply to the motivation-cognition interactions of interest here. Indeed, although there are only a few studies examining the effects of loss incentive on older adults' response to cognitive demands, they are relatively consistent in showing that older adults have either an equivalent or reduced response to loss incentive compared to young adults (e.g., Di Rosa, Schiff, Cagnolati, & Mapelli, 2015;Pachur, Mata, & Hertwig, 2017;Schmitt et al, 2015Schmitt et al, , 2017Williams, Biel, Dyson, & Spaniol, 2017;Williams, Kudus, Dyson, & Spaniol, 2018)). Thus, while we note that the motivational shift hypothesis might superficially appear to predict larger performance improvements, greater motivation, and increased metacognitive accuracy for older adults in the loss condition, we do not consider it likely to apply to the current study.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In most cases, the reduced loss sensitivity of older adults primarily concerns neural or electrophysiological responses to the incentive cue. Overall performance quality often shows similar incentive effects for the two age groups, though there may be some differences in speed-accuracy tradeoffs (e.g., Schmitt et al, 2015;Williams et al, 2017Williams et al, , 2018. This suggests that older adults may be less responsive to loss-incentive cues, but equally (and in some cases, even more so) responsive to the actual delivery of loss incentive.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Losing Money and Motivation: Effects of Loss Incentives on Motivation and Metacognition in Younger and Older Adults

Jang¹,

Lin²,

Lustig³

2019

Preprint

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Incentives are usually expected to increase motivation and the engagement of cognitive control, and to thereby improve performance on cognitively-demanding tasks. However, a closer read of the literature suggests that incentive effects on performance can be elusive. Further, although loss incentives are common in everyday life, most laboratory studies focus on gain effects. Different theoretical perspectives offer competing predictions for the effects of loss incentives, especially in older adults: The intuitive prediction is that loss incentives should improve performance. In contrast, Socioemotional Selectivity Theory and the age-related positivity effect (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005) would predict that older adults should be largely immune to loss-incentive effects. However, Selective Engagement Theory (Hess, 2014) and the Strength and Vulnerability Integration Theory (Charles, 2010) suggest that losses might increase the ‘perceived costs’ for older adults, and thus lead to disengagement and worse performance. Moreover, most studies use changes in performance or other measures as de facto indices of motivation, rather than measuring motivation directly. To address these gaps in the literature, we examined the effects of loss incentives on measures related to subjective engagement, motivation, and meta-cognition as well as working memory. Even though loss incentive did not impact performance, our findings were most consistent with the idea that loss incentives increase the perceived demands of a task and lead to disengagement. The loss incentive also increased the absolute metacognitive accuracy. Despite the lack of age differences in some measures of the incentive effect, the post-task questionnaires suggest different reasons for arriving at these results (distraction vs de-motivation) in younger versus older adults. The results suggest that the effects (or lack thereof) of incentive on performance may reflect factors other than motivation per se.

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