Transient and sustained incentive effects on electrophysiological indices of cognitive control in younger and older adults

Abstract

Preparing for upcoming events, separating task-relevant from task-irrelevant information and efficiently responding to stimuli all require cognitive control. The adaptive recruitment of cognitive control depends on activity in the dopaminergic reward system as well as the frontoparietal control network. In healthy aging, dopaminergic neuromodulation is reduced, resulting in altered incentive-based recruitment of control mechanisms. In the present study, younger adults (18-28 years) and healthy older adults (66-89 years) completed an incentivized flanker task that included gain, loss, and neutral trials. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded at the time of incentive cue and target presentation. We examined the contingent negative variation (CNV), implicated in stimulus anticipation and response preparation, as well as the P3, which is involved in the evaluation of visual stimuli. Both younger and older adults showed transient incentive-based modulation of CNV. Critically, cue-locked and target-locked P3s were influenced by transient and sustained effects of incentives in younger adults, while such modulation was limited to a sustained effect of gain incentives on cue-P3 in older adults. Overall, these findings are in line with an age-related reduction in the flexible recruitment of preparatory and target-related cognitive control processes in the presence of motivational incentives.

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

“…Second, many of these real-world situations rely heavily on working memory, and age differences in working memory are both large and a topic of central interest in both theoretical work and empirical studies of cognition and performance (see Park and Festini, 2017 for a recent review). However, most performance-incentive studies have focused on measures related to attention and cognitive control ( Di Rosa et al, 2015 ; Schmitt et al, 2015 , 2017 ; Williams et al, 2017 , 2018 ; Yee et al, 2019 ), and only a handful have compared young and older adults. As noted above, there have also been a number of reinforcement learning and episodic memory studies focusing more on the ability to learn reward/loss associations or prioritize high vs. low reward items (e.g., Castel et al, 2002 ; Cohen et al, 2016 ), as well as studies on incentivized episodic memory encoding (e.g., Spaniol et al, 2014 ; Geddes et al, 2018 ).…”

“…It does not seem to straightforwardly apply to the motivation-cognitive performance questions of interest here. Indeed, those studies that have examined the effects of loss incentive on older adults’ response to cognitive demands are relatively consistent in showing that older adults have either an equivalent or reduced response to loss incentive compared to young adults and/or to positive incentive (e.g., Bagurdes et al, 2008 ; Di Rosa et al, 2015 ; Schmitt et al, 2015 , 2017 ; Pachur et al, 2017 ; Williams et al, 2017 , 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.…”

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

“…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).…”

“…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.…”

“…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.…”