Evidence map›Paper›PMID 39836118›Full record

ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2025

Rewards transiently and automatically enhance sustained attention.

Juliana E Trach, Megan T deBettencourt, Angela Radulescu, Samuel D McDougle

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
2citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

2 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. The Human Cerebellum Encodes Temporally Sensitive Reinforcement Learning Signals.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026
    Article
  2. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Juliana E TrachDepartment of Psychology, Yale University.ORCID 0000-0002-3429-3839
Megan T deBettencourtDepartment of Psychology, University of Chicago.
Angela RadulescuCenter for Computational Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Samuel D McDougleDepartment of Psychology, Yale University.

Funding

Generalized prediction errors in the human cerebellumR01NS132926 · NINDS · YALE UNIVERSITY · PI Samuel David McDougle · 2023 to 2026
$1.7M
National Science FoundationNINDS NIH HHS R01 NS132926
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Our ability to maintain a consistent attentional state is essential to many aspects of daily life. Still, despite our best efforts, attention naturally fluctuates between more and less vigilant states. Previous work has shown that offering performance-based rewards or incentives can help to buffer against attentional lapses. However, such work is generally focused on long timescales and, critically, does not dissociate between task-based motivation (i.e., where reward is contingent on attention performance) versus more generic motivation or arousal accounts of reward effects. Here, we investigated the influence of reward feedback on attentional vigilance during a simultaneous sustained attention and reinforcement learning (RL) task. Crucially, rewards were tied only to the RL task rather than to attentional performance. We assessed the impact of two core components of RL-reward and surprise-on short-term fluctuations in attentional vigilance. In two experiments (

Indexed as

AttentionMotivationPsychomotor PerformanceReinforcement, PsychologyRewardAdolescentAdultFemaleHumansMaleYoung Adult

Identifiers

PMID39836118
PMCPMC12403975

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

None linked

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.