Monetary incentives modulate serial dependences from memories and responses

Reward and punishment play pivotal roles in cognition. This study investigates how monetary incentives affect serial biases of subsequent responses toward prior targets and responses in an orientation reproduction task. Experiment 1 (n = 20) revealed the attractive impacts of prior target orientations with good memory performance, whereas biases toward prior response angles were more significant regardless of response quality. Experiment 2 (n = 36), introducing a condition without incentives, highlighted the pronounced distinction between biases toward prior target orientations and response angles only in the presence of incentives. Interestingly, subsequent responses exhibited greater biases toward angles of poor prior responses that resulted in nonreward or loss, compared with rewarded or unpunished responses. These findings demonstrate that prior responses accompanied by incentives, especially those associated with nonreward and loss, have a stronger attraction to subsequent responses, shedding new light on the impact of reward and punishment on cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).