What it is
Humans and other animals prioritize the visual processing of stimuli that signal rewards, but research has focused on tangible incentives such as money or food, and the effects of intrinsic incentives such as perceived competence are less well understood. Across a series of visual estimation experiments, the authors manipulated how confident observers felt in their judgements, using either deceptive trial-by-trial feedback or real differences in how reliable the stimuli were. Observers prioritized encoding the stimuli associated with lower uncertainty or error, which benefited performance on stimuli they already estimated accurately while further impairing it on those they estimated poorly.
Why it matters
These reward-driven biases may be adaptive, but in these tasks they impaired overall accuracy, because they made the allocation of visual resources deviate from the strategy that minimizes error. The authors account for the findings by adding a simple reinforcement learning rule to a normalization model of neural resource allocation: intrinsic and external rewards together shape the value the model assigns to each stimulus, and the resulting discrepancies bias resource allocation, and with it estimation error, in a way that quantitatively matches the data. The authors present this as a computational basis for the motivational biases that underlie cognitive performance.
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Filed underNeural and Behavioral Psychology Studies, Visual perception and processing mechanisms, Behavioral and Psychological Studies
