Journal Article

No effect of monetary reward in a visual working memory task

Ma, Wei Ji, Li, Yuhang, van den Berg, Ronald, Zou, Qijia

2023

Overview

Previous work has shown that humans distribute their visual working memory (VWM) resources flexibly across items: the higher the importance of an item, the better it is remembered. A related, but much less studied question is whether people also have control over the total amount of VWM resource allocated to a task. Here, we approach this question by testing whether increasing monetary incentives results in better overall VWM performance. In three experiments, subjects performed a delayed-estimation task on the Amazon Turk platform. In the first two experiments, four groups of subjects received a bonus payment based on their performance, with the maximum bonus ranging from$0 to $ 10 between groups. We found no effect of the amount of bonus on intrinsic motivation or on VWM performance in either experiment. In the third experiment, reward was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis using a within-subjects design. Again, no evidence was found that VWM performance depended on the magnitude of potential reward. These results suggest that encoding quality in visual working memory is insensitive to monetary reward, which has implications for resource-rational theories of VWM.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Biology and Life Sciences / Cognition / Employee incentives / Experiments / Flexibility / Humans / Incentives / Memory / memory task / Memory tasks / Memory, Short-Term / Mental Recall / Mental task performance / money / Motivation / People and Places / Physical Sciences / Psychological aspects / Psychological research / Psychology / psykologi / Questions / Reinforcement / Research and Analysis Methods / resource allocation / Reward / Reward (Psychology) / Sensory memory / Short term memory / Social Sciences / Visual Perception / Visual tasks / visual working memory