Task performance errors and rewards affect voluntary task choices

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Decision Making

Background:

• Human behavior flexibly adapts to demands.
• Task selection is influenced by rewards and performance metrics like error rates.
• The independent effect of performance on task choice, when rewards are decoupled, requires further study.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how reward value and task-specific error rates influence voluntary task selection.
• To determine if previous trial errors impact current task choices.
• To examine reward effects on task choice independent of task performance.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel voluntary task switching paradigm with varying rewards.
• Rewarded participants for task choices prior to task execution.
• Analyzed the influence of reward differences, task error rates, and prior trial errors on task selection.

Main Results:

• Task selection was significantly influenced by reward differences between choices.
• Higher error rates associated with a task decreased the likelihood of switching to it, requiring greater reward incentives.
• Errors on the previous trial (n-1) did not affect the probability of switching tasks.

Conclusions:

• Reward magnitude and task difficulty (error rates) are key determinants of voluntary task selection.
• Task performance, specifically error rates, modulates the influence of reward on decision-making.
• Past performance errors do not appear to influence immediate task-switching decisions in this paradigm.