Consolidation power of extrinsic rewards: reward cues enhance long-term memory for irrelevant past events

Recent research suggests that extrinsic rewards promote memory consolidation through dopaminergic modulation processes. However, no conclusive behavioral evidence exists given that the influence of extrinsic reward on attention and motivation during encoding and consolidation processes are inherently confounded. The present study provides behavioral evidence that extrinsic rewards (i.e., monetary incentives) enhance human memory consolidation independently of attention and motivation. Participants saw neutral pictures, followed by a reward or control cue in an unrelated context. Our results (and a direct replication study) demonstrated that the reward cue predicted a retrograde enhancement of memory for the preceding neutral pictures. This retrograde effect was observed only after a delay, not immediately upon testing. An additional experiment showed that emotional arousal or unconscious resource mobilization cannot explain the retrograde enhancement effect. These results provide support for the notion that the dopaminergic memory consolidation effect can result from extrinsic reward. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)(journal abstract

People’s naiveté about how extrinsic rewards influence intrinsic motivation

Despite the voluminous empirical research on the harmful effects of extrinsic incentives (e.g., money, competition prizes, etc.) on people’s intrinsic motivation (“undermining effect”), our society is still reliant upon the use of extrinsic incentives to motivate people. To better understand the reason underlying this theory-practice gap, the current study examined people’s beliefs about how extrinsic incentives influence recipients’ intrinsic motivation. Participants were presented with a description of a previous experiment which demonstrated the undermining effect, and were asked to make a prediction about the results of the experiment. The findings showed that the majority of participants firmly, but wrongly believed in the beneficial effects of reward on intrinsic motivation and did so with greater confidence. This inaccurate belief about motivation may play a role in the current, frequent use of extrinsic incentives in our society, and the current study suggests the importance of targeting stakeholders’ beliefs in intervention research