ArticlePloS one2023
No effect of monetary reward in a visual working memory task.
Article in PloS one, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Intrinsic rewards guide visual resource allocation via reinforcement learning.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- A combined experimental/individual differences examination of the influence of motivation on cognitive ability assessments.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Bayesian estimation yields anti-Weber variability.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Evidence for the Beneficial Effect of Reward on Working Memory: A Meta-Analytic Study.Journal of Intelligence · 2024Article
- Trying Harder: How Cognitive Effort Sculpts Neural Representations during Working Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Reward influences the allocation but not the availability of resources in visual working memory.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Previous work has shown that humans distribute their visual working memory (VWM) resources flexibly across items: the higher the importance of an item, the better it is remembered. A related, but much less studied question is whether people also have control over the total amount of VWM resource allocated to a task. Here, we approach this question by testing whether increasing monetary incentives results in better overall VWM performance. In three experiments, subjects performed a delayed-estimation task on the Amazon Turk platform. In the first two experiments, four groups of subjects received a bonus payment based on their performance, with the maximum bonus ranging from $0 to $10 between groups. We found no effect of the amount of bonus on intrinsic motivation or on VWM performance in either experiment. In the third experiment, reward was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis using a within-subjects design. Again, no evidence was found that VWM performance depended on the magnitude of potential reward. These results suggest that encoding quality in visual working memory is insensitive to monetary reward, which has implications for resource-rational theories of VWM.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.