The interaction of curiosity and reward on long-term memory in younger and older adults

Abstract

The study was conducted to examine the individual and joint effects of extrinsic motivation, manipulated via monetary reward, and curiosity, a form of intrinsic motivation, on long-term memory in the context of a trivia paradigm, in healthy younger and older adults. During the incidental encoding phase on Day 1, 60 younger and 53 older participants viewed high- and low-curiosity trivia as well as unrelated face stimuli. Half of the participants in each age group received financial rewards for correctly guessing trivia answers. On Day 2, participants completed old-new recognition tests for trivia and face stimuli. Both curiosity and reward were associated with enhanced trivia recall, but the effects were interactive, such that only low-curiosity items benefitted from monetary reward. Neither curiosity nor reward affected face recognition performance in either age group. This pattern was similar for younger and older adults. The current data indicate that individual and joint effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on long-term memory are relatively preserved in healthy aging, a finding that highlights the viability of motivational strategies for memory enhancement into old age. Identifying conditions under which memory for unrelated information benefits from motivational spillover effects is a priority for future research.

Broad Brain Networks Support Curiosity-Motivated Incidental Learning Of Naturalistic Dynamic Stimuli With And Without Monetary Incentives

“…In contrast to the previous studies manipulating monetary reward within the trivia question paradigm (Murayama & Kuhbandner, 2011; Swirsky et al, 2021), we did not find a significant interaction between curiosity and incentive on any of our main measures of interest (recognition, high confidence recognition, cued recall). While the non-significant interaction effect may be explained by the differences in the design (e.g., materials, memory measures, and procedure to manipulate incentives compared to rewards), we also found an interesting dissociation between the effect of curiosity and that of incentives on memory.…”

“…Jepma et al, 2012). The same curiosity effects have also been found in incidental encoding paradigms after short (Brod & Breitwieser, 2019; Galli et al, 2018; Gruber et al, 2014; Jepma et al, 2012; Ligneul et al, 2018; Mullaney et al, 2014; Murphy, Dehmelt, et al, 2021; Poh et al, 2021; Stare et al, 2018) and long (Fastrich et al, 2018; Gruber et al, 2014; Kang et al, 2009; Marvin & Shohamy, 2016; Murayama & Kuhbandner, 2011; Stare et al, 2018; Swirsky et al, 2021) delays between encoding and retrieval. Interestingly, incidental information that is semantically unrelated to the cue eliciting the feeling of curiosity but presented in close temporal proximity (i.e., during a state of high compared to low curiosity) is also preferably encoded (Galli et al, 2018; Gruber et al, 2014; Murphy, Dehmelt, et al, 2021; Stare et al, 2018).…”

“…Murayama and Kuhbander (2011) found that both monetary reward and the interestingness of trivia questions (as rated by a separate sample) had an enhancing effect on encoding, but the main effects were further qualified by an interaction, where monetary rewards only enhanced encoding of trivia questions rated as not interesting. The findings were replicated in younger and older adults (Swirsky et al, 2021) although some other studies failed to find the interaction effects (Duan et al, 2020;Halamish et al, 2019). Thus, the literature suggests the possibility that there may be unique non-additive neural patterns when both curiosity and monetary incentives are present.…”

Curiosity-Motivated Incidental Learning With And Without Incentives: Early Consolidation And Midbrain-Hippocampal Resting-State Functional Connectivity

“…Gruber et al, 2016; Murty & Adcock, 2014). The effects of curiosity on encoding, on the other hand, have consistently been found after short (Brod & Breitwieser, 2019; Galli et al, 2018; Gruber et al, 2014; Jepma et al, 2012; Ligneul et al, 2018; Mullaney et al, 2014; Murphy, Dehmelt, et al, 2021; Poh et al, 2021) and long (Duan et al, 2020; Fastrich et al, 2018; Gruber et al, 2014; Halamish et al, 2019; Kang et al, 2009; Marvin & Shohamy, 2016; Murayama & Kuhbandner, 2011; Swirsky et al, 2021) delays between encoding and retrieval. A study examining the effects of curiosity levels on later memory by testing half of the items after a short and the other half of the items after a long delay found that curiosity correlated with encoding at both time intervals (McGillivray et al, 2015).…”

The Magic, Memory, and Curiosity fMRI Dataset of People Viewing Magic Tricks

“…To be able to investigate incidental encoding (similar to previous research 38,65 ), participants were presented with a cover story that the study investigates problem solving, social cognition, and the associated brain processes. They were briefed that they would be performing a viewing and judgement task involving magic tricks inside the MRI scanner and that there would be an online follow-up assessment related to their responses a week later.…”