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Related Experiment Videos

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

Leonard Ngaosuvan1, Timo Mäntylä

  • 1University of Umeå, Umeå, Sweden. leonard.ngaosuvan@psy.umu.se

Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
|July 15, 2005
PubMed
Summary

Motivation may not boost memory as much as people think. This study found that extrinsic motivation, like competition, increased self-rated motivation but did not improve memory recall performance.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Human Memory
  • Motivation Science

Background:

  • Common belief suggests motivation enhances memory performance.
  • Previous research indicates minimal motivation effects on memory when controlling for encoding/retrieval biases.
  • A dissociation between motivation and memory performance requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the relationship between extrinsic motivation and memory performance using sensitive measures.
  • To examine if extrinsic motivation influences content recall and source recall.
  • To test the generality of the dissociation between motivation and memory.

Main Methods:

  • Extrinsic motivation was induced via competition instructions.
  • Participants provided subjective ratings of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

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  • Memory performance was assessed using content recall and source recall tasks.

    • Main Results:

    • Competition successfully increased self-rated extrinsic motivation.
    • No significant effects of competition on content recall were observed.
    • Source recall performance remained unaffected by the extrinsic motivation manipulation.

    Conclusions:

    • Extrinsic motivation, induced by competition, shows a dissociation from objective memory performance.
    • Subjective motivation ratings do not reliably predict memory outcomes.
    • Findings challenge the intuitive link between extrinsic motivation and enhanced memory recall.