Rewarded remembering: dissociations between self-rated motivation and memory performance

People often claim that they perform better in memory performance tasks when they are more motivated. However, past research has shown minimal effects of motivation on memory performance when factors contributing to item-specific biases during encoding and retrieval are taken into account. The purpose of the present study was to examine the generality of this apparent dissociation by using more sensitive measures of experienced motivation and memory performance. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through competition instructions, and subjective ratings of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were obtained before and after study instructions. Participants studied a series of words, and memory performance was assessed by content recall (Experiment 1) and source recall (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed dissociation between subjective ratings of extrinsic motivation and actual memory performance, so that competition increased self-rated extrinsic motivation but had no effects on memory performance, including source recall. Inconsistent with most people's expectations, the findings suggest that extrinsic motivation has minimal effects on memory performance.