CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Cogn Sci. 2020 Mar;44(3):e12825. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12825.
Studies have shown that performance-dependent monetary rewards facilitate visual perception. However, no study has examined whether such a positive effect is limited to the rewarded task or may be generalized to other tasks. In the current study, two groups of people were asked to perform two visual perception tasks, one being a reward-relevant task and the other being a reward-irrelevant task. For the reward-relevant task, the experimental group received performance-dependent monetary rewards, whereas the control group did not. For the reward-irrelevant task, both groups were not rewarded. The two tasks were randomly intermixed trial by trial (Experiment 1) or presented block by block (Experiment 2) or session by session (Experiments 3a, 3b, and 3c). Results showed that performance-dependent monetary rewards improved participants' performance on the relevant task in all experiments and impaired their performance on the irrelevant task in Experiments 2, 3a, 3b, and 3c. These results suggested that monetary rewards might incur a cost on reward-irrelevant tasks. Finally, the benefit of monetary rewards disappeared when they were no longer provided during the final session. This is the first study that reveals both the bright and dark sides of the performance-dependent monetary rewards in visual perception.
研究表明，绩效相关的金钱奖励有助于视觉感知。然而，尚无研究检验这种积极影响是否仅限于奖励任务，或者是否可以推广到其他任务。在本研究中，两组人被要求执行两项视觉感知任务，一项是与奖励相关的任务，另一项是与奖励无关的任务。对于奖励相关的任务，实验组获得绩效相关的金钱奖励，而对照组则没有。对于奖励无关的任务，两组都没有得到奖励。两个任务在实验 1 中逐次随机混合，在实验 2 中逐块呈现，或在实验 3a、3b 和 3c 中逐 session 呈现。结果表明，在所有实验中，绩效相关的金钱奖励都提高了参与者在相关任务上的表现，而在实验 2、3a、3b 和 3c 中，参与者在无关任务上的表现则受到了损害。这些结果表明，金钱奖励可能会给无关任务带来成本。最后，当最后一个 session 不再提供金钱奖励时，奖励的好处就消失了。这是第一项揭示绩效相关金钱奖励在视觉感知中既有好处又有坏处的研究。
