ABSTRACT
While a globally energizing infl uence of (typically reward-induced) motivation on human cognitive and motor functions has long been recognized in psychological research, a series of recent studies has described motivational infl uences on more specifi c cognitive operations. Beyond increasing the frequency of a specifi c action in accordance with the principles of reinforcement learning, the prospect of reward has been shown to improve performance in different domains ranging from visual attention, to cognitive control, to memory formation (e.g., Adcock et al., 2006; Braver et al., 2014; Chelazzi et al., 2013; Engelmann et al., 2009; Krebs et al., 2011, 2012; Locke and Braver, 2008; Padmala and Pessoa, 2011; Pessoa and Engelmann, 2010; Schmidt et al., 2012). To date, most (but not all) of these studies identifi ed reward effects by using block designs or variants of the monetary-incentive delay (MID) task, in which a cue indicates the prospect of reward for an upcoming task. In this chapter, we will start with a general description of such paradigms for context, but then mostly focus on a more recent line of studies that manipulate reward prospect in a trial-by-trial fashion in the absence of pre-target cues by linking reward prospect directly to features of the target stimuli.
