ABSTRACT
While a globally energizing influence 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 influences on more specific cognitive operations. Beyond increasing the frequency of a specific 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 identified 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.
