RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 No effect of monetary reward in a visual working memory task
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 767343
DO 10.1101/767343
A1 Ronald van den Berg
A1 Qijia Zou
A1 Yuhang Li
A1 Wei Ji Ma
YR 2022
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/01/25/767343.abstract
AB 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.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.