Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
Cognition. 2010 Dec;117(3):341-7. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.018. Epub 2010 Sep 22.
Performance in a behavioral task can be facilitated by associating stimulus properties with reward. In contrast, conflicting information is known to impede task performance. Here we investigated how reward associations influence the within-trial processing of conflicting information using a color-naming Stroop task in which a subset of ink colors (task-relevant dimension) was associated with monetary incentives. We found that color-naming performance was enhanced on trials with potential-reward versus those without. Moreover, in potential-reward trials, typical conflict-induced performance decrements were attenuated if the incongruent word (task-irrelevant dimension) was unrelated to reward. In contrast, incongruent words that were semantically related to reward-predicting ink colors interfered with performance in potential-reward trials and even more so in no-reward trials, despite the semantic meaning being entirely task-irrelevant. These observations imply that the prospect of reward enhances the processing of task-relevant stimulus information, whereas incongruent reward-related information in a task-irrelevant dimension can impede task performance.
在行为任务中，通过将刺激属性与奖励联系起来，可以促进表现。相比之下，已知冲突信息会阻碍任务表现。在这里，我们使用颜色命名 Stroop 任务研究了奖励关联如何影响冲突信息的在试内处理，在该任务中，一部分墨水颜色（任务相关维度）与金钱奖励相关联。我们发现，与没有潜在奖励的试验相比，在潜在奖励试验中，颜色命名表现得到了增强。此外，如果不一致的单词（任务无关维度）与奖励无关，那么在潜在奖励试验中，典型的冲突引起的表现下降会减弱。相比之下，即使语义完全与任务无关，与奖励预测墨水颜色相关的语义相关的不一致单词也会干扰潜在奖励试验中的表现，在没有奖励的试验中更是如此。这些观察结果表明，奖励的前景增强了对任务相关刺激信息的处理，而任务无关维度中不一致的与奖励相关的信息会阻碍任务表现。
