Department of Psychology, McGill University.
Department of Psychology, Durham University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2024 May;153(5):1257-1267. doi: 10.1037/xge0001561. Epub 2024 Mar 7.
The now-classic goal-gradient hypothesis posits that organisms increase effort expenditure as a function of their proximity to a goal. Despite nearly a century having passed since its original formulation, goal-gradient-like behavior in human cognitive performance remains poorly understood: Are we more willing to engage in costly cognitive processing when we are near, versus far, from a goal state? Moreover, the computational mechanisms underpinning these potential goal-gradient effects-for example, whether goal proximity affects fidelity of stimulus encoding, response caution, or other identifiable mechanisms governing speed and accuracy-are unclear. Here, in two experiments, we examine the effect of goal proximity, operationalized as progress toward the completion of a rewarded task block, upon task performance in an attentionally demanding oddball task. Supporting the goal-gradient hypothesis, we found that participants responded more quickly, but not less accurately, when rewards were proximal than when they were distal. Critically, this effect was only observed when participants were given information about goal proximity. Using hierarchical drift diffusion modeling, we found that these apparent goal-gradient performance effects were best explained by a collapsing bound model, in which proximity to a goal reduced response caution and increased information processing. Taken together, these results suggest that goal gradients could help explain the oft-observed fluctuations in engagement of cognitively effortful processing, extending the scope of the goal-gradient hypothesis to the domain of cognitive tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
现在经典的目标梯度假说假设，生物体随着接近目标，会增加努力的支出。尽管自最初提出以来已经过去了近一个世纪，但人类认知表现中的目标梯度样行为仍然知之甚少：当我们接近目标状态时，我们是否更愿意进行昂贵的认知处理，而不是远离目标状态？此外，这些潜在目标梯度效应的计算机制——例如，目标接近度是否会影响刺激编码的保真度、反应谨慎性或其他可识别的控制速度和准确性的机制——尚不清楚。在这里，我们在两项实验中研究了目标接近度（以完成奖励任务块的进度来衡量）对注意力要求高的奇特任务中任务表现的影响。支持目标梯度假说，我们发现当奖励接近时，参与者的反应速度更快，但准确性没有降低。关键的是，只有当参与者获得目标接近度的信息时，才会观察到这种效应。使用层次漂移扩散建模，我们发现，接近目标可以通过降低反应谨慎性和增加信息处理来解释这种明显的目标梯度表现效应，这一模型最好地解释了这种效应。综上所述，这些结果表明，目标梯度可以帮助解释认知费力处理的参与度经常出现的波动，将目标梯度假说的范围扩展到认知任务领域。
