Interactive effects of incentive value and valence on the performance of discrete action sequences

Abstract

Incentives can be used to increase motivation, leading to better learning and performance on skilled motor tasks. Prior work has shown that monetary punishments enhance on-line performance while equivalent monetary rewards enhance off-line skill retention. However, a large body of literature on loss aversion has shown that losses are treated as larger than equivalent gains. The divergence between the effects of punishments and reward on motor learning could be due to perceived differences in incentive value rather than valence per se. We test this hypothesis by manipulating incentive value and valence while participants trained to perform motor sequences. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that large reward enhanced on-line performance but impaired the ability to retain the level of performance achieved during training. However, we also found that on-line performance was better with reward than punishment and that the effect of increasing incentive value was more linear with reward (small, medium, large) while the effect of value was more binary with punishment (large vs not large). These results suggest that there are differential effects of punishment and reward on motor learning and that these effects of valence are unlikely to be driven by differences in the subjective magnitude of gains and losses.

Reward influences the allocation but not the availability of resources in visual working memory.

“…Instead, rewards simply modulated the flexible allocation of resources to different items within the display. The current results indicate that the effect of reward on visual working memory differs from the primarily facilitatory effect previously shown for motor processes or higher order decision processes (Adkins et al, 2021; Anderson et al, 2020; Boehler et al, 2012; Chiew & Braver, 2013, 2016; Hübner & Schlösser, 2010; Krebs et al, 2011; Manohar et al, 2015, 2018; Takikawa et al, 2002). Rather than providing a global boost to performance, any reward benefit for prioritized items came at the expense of deprioritized items.…”

“…Monetary incentives increase both the speed and accuracy of movements, seemingly violating the speed-accuracy tradeoff predicted by optimal control theory (Adkins et al, 2021;Anderson et al, 2020;Manohar et al, 2015Manohar et al, , 2018Takikawa et al, 2002). Participants also benefit from rewards in the performance of cognitive control tasks, exhibiting both reduced reaction time and increased accuracy (Boehler et al, 2012;Chiew & Braver, 2013;Hübner & Schlösser, 2010;Krebs et al, 2011).…”

The effects of reward and punishment on the performance of ping-pong ball bouncing

“…Specifically, online performance was found to improve with increasing reward and punishment values. Compared to previous studies, only large reward can promote online performance for both motor adaptation ( Nikooyan and Ahmed, 2015 ) and SRTT ( Adkins et al, 2021 ). In the present study, the reward participants received larger reward, while the punishment participants received smaller punishment, with an improvement in performance from day 1 to day 3.…”

“…The differential reinforcement effects during early and late training may be explained by the change in incentive size over the 3 days. Incentive size has been found to modulate the effect of reinforcement on motor learning ( Adkins et al, 2021 ). Specifically, online performance was found to improve with increasing reward and punishment values.…”