Shen Y Jeremy, Chun Marvin M
Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2011 Apr;73(3):938-52. doi: 10.3758/s13414-010-0065-7.
Offering reward for performance can motivate people to perform a task better, but better preparation for one task usually means decreased flexibility to perform different tasks. In six experiments in which reward varied between low and high levels, we found that reward can encourage people to prepare more flexibly for different tasks, but only as it increased from the level on the previous trial. When the same high rewards were offered continuously trial after trial, people were more inclined to simply stick with doing what had worked previously. We demonstrated such enhancements in flexibility in task switching, a difficult visual search task, and an easier priming of pop-out search task, which shows that this effect generalizes from executive tasks to perceptual processes that require relatively little executive control. These findings suggest that relative, transient changes in reward can exert more potent effects on behavioral flexibility than can the absolute amount of reward, whether it consists of money or points in a social competition.
为表现提供奖励可以激励人们更好地完成一项任务，但为一项任务做更好的准备通常意味着执行不同任务的灵活性降低。在六个奖励水平在低和高之间变化的实验中，我们发现奖励可以鼓励人们为不同任务更灵活地做准备，但前提是奖励要比上一次试验的水平有所提高。当一次又一次地持续提供相同的高奖励时，人们更倾向于简单地坚持做之前有效的事情。我们在任务切换、一项困难的视觉搜索任务以及一项更简单的弹出式搜索任务的启动中证明了这种灵活性的增强，这表明这种效应从执行任务推广到了需要相对较少执行控制的感知过程。这些发现表明，奖励的相对、短暂变化对行为灵活性的影响可能比奖励的绝对数量更大，无论奖励是金钱还是社会竞争中的积分。
