High-reward-induced motivation produced a significant inhibition of return effect at long cue-target delays, whereas low-reward conditions did not, indicating reward affects attentional reorienting.
Reward-induced motivation enhances top-down reorienting and cognitive control (inhibition of return and posterror slowing) but does not affect initial automatic exogenous attention orienting.
p-value: p=<0.01
It is thought that reward-induced motivation influences perceptual, attentional, and cognitive control processes to facilitate behavioral performance. In this study, we investigated the effect of reward-induced motivation on exogenous attention orienting and inhibition of return (IOR). Attention was captured by peripheral onset cues that were nonpredictive for the target location. Participants performed a target discrimination task at short (170 ms) and long (960 ms) cue-target stimulus onset asynchronies. Reward-induced motivation was manipulated by exposing participants to low- and high-reward blocks. Typical cue facilitation effects on initial orienting were observed for both the low- and high-reward conditions. However, IOR was found only for the high-reward condition. This indicates that reward-induced motivation has a clear effect on reorienting and inhibitory processes following the initial capture of attention, but not on initial exogenous orienting that is considered to be exclusively automatic and stimulus-driven. We suggest that initial orienting is completely data-driven, not affected by top-down motivational processes, while reorienting and the accompanying IOR effect involve motivational top-down processes. To support this, we showed that reward-induced motivational processes and top-down control processes co-act in order to improve behavioral performance: High-reward-induced motivation caused an increase in top-down cognitive control, as signified by posterror slowing. Moreover, we show that personality trait propensity to reward-driven behavior (BAS-Drive scale) was related to reward-triggered behavioral changes in top-down reorienting, but not to changes in automatic orienting.
Bucker et al. (Wed,) conducted a other in Healthy volunteers (n=35). High monetary reward vs. Low monetary reward (€0.10 per block) was evaluated on Inhibition of return (reaction time difference between valid and invalid cues at long delay) (p=<0.01). High-reward-induced motivation produced a significant inhibition of return effect at long cue-target delays, whereas low-reward conditions did not, indicating reward affects attentional reorienting.