Conscious and Unconscious Reward Cues Can Affect a Critical Component of Executive Control

Abstract

The present study investigates whether updating an important function of executive control can be driven by unconscious reward cues. Participants had to memorize several numbers and update those numbers independently according to a sequence of arithmetic operations. At the beginning of each trial, a reward (1 euro or 5 cents) was presented, either subliminally or supraliminally. Participants could earn the reward if they found the correct response on the updating task. Results showed better performance when a high (conscious or unconscious) reward was at stake compared to a low reward. This suggests that subliminal information can influence a component process of executive control traditionally thought to require consciousness.

Mechanisms of motivation–cognition interaction: challenges and opportunities

“…In these studies, the reward that can be earned on a particular trial is cued at its beginning, either clearly visible, or presented subliminally. Subliminally presented high-reward cues have been found to induce more cognitive effort expenditure than low-reward cues (Bijleveld, Custers, & Aarts, 2009; Capa, Bustin, Cleeremans, & Hansenne, 2011). A few cognitive neuroscience studies using subliminally presented reward cues have demonstrated that these engage subcortical motivation-linked brain regions, such as the ventral pallidum, in proportion to incentive value (Pessiglione et al, 2007; Schmidt et al, 2008).…”

Long-lasting effect of subliminal processes on cardiovascular responses and performance

“…We surmise that this difference stems from the fact that in the current study, contrary to several studies in cognitive sciences, we used subliminal stimuli that are intrinsically related to people's goals and motivation. Recent studies used subliminal stimuli related to people's goals and motivation (Capa et al, 2011a;Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2010;Silvia et al, 2011) but were designed to show short term mobilization of effort (i.e., several seconds) during task performance.…”

“…To achieve this we exposed participants first to the primes and assessed then if this has effects on a subsequent learning task rather than integrating primes into a task to establish direct and short term effects-as frequently done in recent studies (Capa et al, 2011a;Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2010;Silvia et al, 2011). Based on the evaluative conditioning paradigm used by Aarts et al (2008aAarts et al ( , 2008b and Custers and Aarts (2007), three groups of students were exposed to 100 trials of subliminal primes before performing an easy or a difficult learning task (see Fig.…”

“…Recently, several studies have suggested that even behavior associated with higher cognitive (Capa et al, 2011a;Lau and Passingham, 2007) and motivational functions (Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2010;Pessiglione et al, 2007) can be driven by subliminal processes. Because such effects never exceed a few seconds (e.g., Dupoux et al 2008;Greenwald et al, 1996;Lu et al, 2005), there is widespread agreement that unconscious representations are short-lived (Dehaene and Naccache, 2001;Dehaene et al, 2006).…”

Once the money is in sight: Distinctive effects of conscious and unconscious rewards on task performance

“…Subliminal rewards seem to increase cognitive performance to the same extent as do 'normal' (consciously perceived) rewards, as revealed by converging evidence from working memory tasks (Capa et al, 2011;Zedelius et al, in press), mathematical tasks (Bijleveld, Custers & Aarts, 2010), and physiological measurements (Bijleveld, Custers & Aarts, 2009). These findings indicate that monetary rewards enhance performance on various cognitive tasks, including those reliant on working memory, without awareness.…”