ABSTRACT
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 two experiments, subjects performed a delayed-estimation task on the Amazon Turk platform. In both 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. These results suggest that resource allocation in visual working memory is insensitive to monetary reward, which has implications for resource-rational theories of VWM.
Footnotes
We removed the analysis in which we compared performance between the two experiments, because - as was pointed out by one of the reviewers - there were too many factors that could potentially explain the small difference that we found.