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Studying Food Reward and Motivation in Humans
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Rewards boost sustained attention through higher effort: A value-based decision making approach.

Stijn A A Massar1, Julian Lim1, Karen Sasmita1

  • 1Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore.

Biological Psychology
|August 8, 2016
PubMed
Summary

Motivation enhances sustained attention by increasing cognitive effort, but prolonged vigilance is perceived as a cost that influences reward valuation. This study links motivation, effort, and decision-making in attention tasks.

Keywords:
Decision makingEffort-discountingPupillometryReward motivationSustained attention

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Decision Neuroscience
  • Attention Research

Background:

  • Sustained attention is an effortful cognitive process constrained by limited resources.
  • Motivation is theorized to influence resource allocation through a cost-benefit decision process.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the role of motivation in sustained attention by examining effort and resource allocation.
  • To combine methods from attention research and decision neuroscience to test the motivation-effort hypothesis.

Main Methods:

  • Participants completed a sustained attention task with varying reward levels.
  • A reward-discounting task was used to measure the subjective costs of performance.
  • Attentional effort was assessed using pupil diameter measurements.

Main Results:

  • Increased rewards improved sustained attention performance across experiments.
  • Higher rewards led to enhanced attentional effort, indicated by pupil diameter.
  • Participants devalued rewards associated with prolonged vigilance, demonstrating perceived costs.

Conclusions:

  • Motivation boosts sustained attention via increased cognitive effort.
  • Sustained performance is treated as a cost in decision-making, influencing reward valuation.