High Reward Makes Items Easier to Remember, but Harder to Bind to a New Temporal Context

Abstract

Learning through reward is central to adaptive behavior. Indeed, items are remembered better if they are experienced while participants expect a reward, and people can deliberately prioritize memory for high- over low-valued items. Do memory advantages for high-valued items only emerge after deliberate prioritization in encoding? Or, do reward-based memory enhancements also apply to unrewarded memory tests and to implicit memory? First, we tested for a high-value memory advantage in unrewarded implicit- and explicit-tests (Experiment 1). Participants first learned high or low-reward values of 36 words, followed by unrewarded lexical decision and free-recall tests. High-value words were judged faster in lexical decision, and more often recalled in free recall. These two memory advantages for high-value words were negatively correlated suggesting at least two mechanisms by which reward value can influence later item-memorability. The ease with which the values were originally acquired explained the negative correlation: people who learned values earlier showed reward effects in implicit memory whereas people who learned values later showed reward effects in explicit memory. We then asked whether a high-value advantage would persist if trained items were linked to a new context (Experiments 2a and 2b). Following the same value training as in Experiment 1, participants learned lists composed of previously trained words mixed with new words, each followed by free recall. Thus, participants had to retrieve words only from the most recent list, irrespective of their values. High- and low-value words were recalled equally, but low-value words were recalled earlier than high-value words and high-value words were more often intruded (proactive interference). Thus, the high-value advantage holds for implicit- and explicit-memory, but comes with a side effect: High-value items are more difficult to relearn in a new context. Similar to emotional arousal, reward value can both enhance and impair memory.

Rapid makes risky: Time pressure increases risk seeking in decisions from experience

“…Here we predict that response latencies will be shorter for the high-value than low-value options, consistent with results found for humans (e.g., Madan, Fujiwara, Gerson, & Caplan, 2012;Shenhav & Buckner, 2014 (Shapiro, Siller, & Kacelnik, 2008). This prediction is also convergent with the notion that a fundamental purpose of movements is to obtain rewards, leading people to move faster when a higher value reward is the predicted goal (e.g., Haith, Reppert, & Shadmehr, 2012;Madan, 2013).…”

Extreme Outcomes Sway Risky Decisions from Experience

“…In other contexts, choice is indeed influenced by the biases inherent in human memory (see Weber & Johnson, ). There is a well‐known bias in which highly salient and emotional events are overweighted in memory tasks (e.g., Brown & Kulik, ; Madan et al, ; Madan & Spetch, ; Phelps & Sharot, ; Talarico & Rubin, ) and retrospective judgments, as in the peak‐end rule (e.g., Fredrickson, ; Kahneman et al, ). Thus, one possibility is that the extreme outcomes are more likely to be retrieved at the time of the decision (cf.…”

Influence of reward motivation on human declarative memory

“…Reward-value memory and associated energizing effects of reward motivation may linger and transfer to other tasks producing, for instance, speeded responding to previously rewarded items in a non-rewarded task that immediately follows a reward learning procedure (Madan et al, 2012). According to Berridge's notion of incentive salience, the reward-conditioned cue can prime further consumption by associative spread of incentive salience among linked representations, so that it is difficult to stop at just one small treat (Berridge, 2012).…”

“…In a behavioral experiment, Madan et al (2012) have demonstrated that after a reward conditioning procedure, rewardassociated items are more readily recalled in a non-rewarded task involving word judgment than non-rewarded words. Critically, they also found that the memory of the reward value attached to the conditioned words later interfered with new learning, when participants were given lists of 9 words followed by a distractor task and immediate free recall.…”