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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 4, 2026

An Appetitive Spatial Working Memory Task for Mice in a Semi-Automated 8-Arm Radial Maze, Reducing Fearful Memory Association in the Maze

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Published on: July 29, 2025

Learned reward association improves visual working memory.

Mengyuan Gong¹, Sheng Li¹

¹Department of Psychology, Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University.

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance

|January 8, 2014

Summary

Learned reward associations enhance visual working memory (VWM) for task-irrelevant features. This improvement occurs beyond simple attentional capture, suggesting direct modulation of perceptual representations.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Behavioral Psychology

Background:

Statistical regularities, particularly reward associations, are crucial for adaptive behavior.
Previous research indicates reward associations strongly influence spatial attention allocation.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if reward association can improve visual working memory (VWM) performance for task-irrelevant features.
To explore the mechanisms underlying reward effects in VWM, differentiating from attentional capture.

Main Methods:

Established reward associations through a visual search training session.
Assessed VWM using a change detection task before and after training.
Conducted control experiments to isolate reward effects from attentional capture.

Main Results:

VWM performance improved significantly more for items with high reward-associated colors compared to low reward or non-rewarded colors.
Control experiments confirmed the reward effect was not solely due to attentional capture.
Improvement persisted even when attentional capture was minimized.

Conclusions:

Learned reward associations enhance VWM performance for task-irrelevant features.
Reward association facilitates perceptual representation via feature-based attentional modulation, beyond spatial attentional capture.