Abstract
An important question is whether monetary reward can increase attentional effort in order to improve performance. Up to now, evidence for a positive answer is weak. Therefore, in the present study, the flanker task was used to examine this question further. Participants had to respond sooner than a certain deadline in a flanker task. One group of participants received a performance-contingent monetary reward, whereas the other group earned a fixed amount of money. As a result, monetary reward significantly improved performance in comparison with the control group. The analysis of speed-accuracy trade-off functions revealed that monetary reward increased attentional effort, leading to an enhanced quality of stimulus coding. Little evidence was found that reward also improved selective spatial attention.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bonner, S., & Sprinkle, G. B. (2002). The effects of monetary incentives on effort and task performance: Theories, evidence, and a framework for research. Accounting, Organizations & Society, 27, 303–345.
Camerer, C. F., & Hogarth, R. M. (1999). The effects of financial incentives in experiments: A review and capital-labor-production framework. Journal of Risk & Uncertainty, 19, 7–42.
Della Libera, C. D., & Chelazzi, L. (2006). Visual selective attention and the effects of monetary rewards. Psychological Science, 17, 222–227.
Della Libera, C. D., & Chelazzi, L. (2009). Learning to attend and to ignore is a matter of gains and losses. Psychological Science, 20, 778–784.
Engelmann, J. B., Damaraju, E., Padmala, S., & Pessoa, L. (2009). Combined effects of attention and motivation on visual task performance: Transient and sustained motivational effects. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 3, 1–16.
Engelmann, J. B., & Pessoa, L. (2007). Motivation sharpens exogenous spatial attention. Emotion, 7, 668–674.
Eriksen, B. A., & Eriksen, C. W. (1974). Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task. Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 143–149.
Goard, M., & Dan, Y. (2009). Basal forebrain activation enhances cortical coding of natural scenes. Nature Neuroscience, 12, 1440–1447.
Jenkins, G. D., Mitra, A., Gupta, N., & Shaw, J. D. (1998). Are financial incentives related to performance? A meta-analystic review of empirical research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 777–787.
Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Kiss, M., Driver, J., & Eimer, M. (2009). Reward priority of visual target singletons modulates event-related potential signatures of attentional selection. Psychological Science, 20, 245–251.
Mobbs, D., Hassabis, D., Seymour, B., Marchant, J. L., Weiskopf, N., Dolan, R. J., et al. (2009). Choking on the money: Reward-based performance decrements are associated with midbrain activity. Psychological Science, 20, 955–962.
Ratcliff, R., & Rouder, J. N. (1998). Modeling response times for two-choice decisions. Psychological Science, 9, 347–356.
Sarter, M., Gehring, W. J., & Kozak, R. (2006). More attention must be paid: The neurobiology of attentional effort. Brain Research Reviews, 51, 145–160.
Schupp, H. T., Cuthbert, B. N., Bradley, M. M., Hillman, C. H., Hamm, A. O., & Lang, P. J. (2004). Brain processes in emotional perception: Motivated attention. Cognition & Emotion, 18, 593–611.
Small, D. M., Gitelman, D., Simmons, K., Bloise, S. M., Parrish, T., & Mesulam, M. M. (2005). Monetary incentives enhance processing in brain regions mediating top-down control of attention. Cerebral Cortex, 15, 1855–1865.
Taylor, S. F., Martis, B., Fitzgerald, K. D., Welsh, R. C., Abelson, J. L., Liberzon, I., et al. (2006). Medial frontal cortex activity and loss-related responses to errors. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4063–4070.
Wolfe, J. M., Butcher, S. J., Lee, C., & Hyle, M. (2003). Changing your mind: On the contributions of top-down and bottom-up guidance in visual search for feature singletons. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 29, 483–502.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hübner, R., Schlösser, J. Monetary reward increases attentional effort in the flanker task. Psychon Bull Rev 17, 821–826 (2010). https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.17.6.821
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.17.6.821