Motivated Cognition: Effects of Reward, Emotion, and Other Motivational Factors Across a Variety of Cognitive Domains

Age-Related Differences in Framing Selective Memory in Terms of Gains and Losses

We examined whether framing younger and older adults learning goals in terms of maximizing gains or minimizing losses impacts their ability to selectively remember high-value information. Specifically, we presented younger and older adults with lists of words paired with point values and participants were either told that they would receive the value associated with each word if they recalled it on a test or that they would lose the points associated with each word if they failed to recall it on the test. We also asked participants to predict the likelihood of recalling each word to determine if younger and older adults were metacognitively aware of any potential framing effects. Results revealed that older adults expected to be more selective when their goals were framed in terms of losses, but younger adults expected to be more selective when their goals were framed in terms of gains. However, this was not the case as both younger and older adults were more selective for high-value information when their goals were framed in terms of maximizing gains compared with minimizing losses. Thus, the framing of learning goals can impact metacognitive decisions and subsequent memory in both younger and older adults.

Serial and strategic memory processes in younger and older adults

We investigated age-related differences in serial and strategic processing during the encoding and retrieval of high-value words. Younger and older adults were presented with word triads positioned left, center, and right, with one word being more valuable than the others. In Experiment 1, younger adults more effectively recalled the middle, high-value word, demonstrating enhanced strategic memory. Younger adults were more likely to initiate recall with a high-value word whereas older adults were equally likely to initiate recall with a left and high-value word. Additionally, older adults were more likely to recall words in their presented order while younger adults strategically recalled successive high-value words. However, both age groups demonstrated strategic processing in Experiments 2 and 3, even without prior knowledge of the high-value word's location. Thus, serial and strategic processing may differ based on age and task demands, but strategic processing is preserved in older adults in certain contexts.

The perceived importance of words in large font guides learning and selective memory

People are often presented with large amounts of information to remember, and in many cases, the font size of information may be indicative of its importance (such as headlines or warnings). In the present study, we examined how learners perceive the importance of information in different font sizes and how beliefs about font size influence selective memory. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with to-be-remembered words that were either unrelated or related to a goal (e.g., items for a camping trip) in either small or large font. Participants rated words in large font as more important to remember than words in small font when the words in a list were unrelated but not when the words were schematically related to a goal. In Experiments 2 and 3, we were interested in how learners' belief that font size is indicative of importance translates to their ability to selectively encode and recall valuable information. Specifically, we presented participants with words in various font sizes, and larger fonts either corresponded to greater point values or smaller point values (values counted towards participants' scores if recalled). When larger fonts corresponded with greater point values, participants were better able to selectively remember high-value words relative to low-value words. Thus, when to-be-remembered information varies in value, font size may be less diagnostic of an item's importance (the item's importance drives memory), and when the value of information is consistent with a learner's belief, learners can better engage in selective memory.

Age-Related Differences in Overcoming Interference When Selectively Remembering Important Information

We examined the effects of interference on value-based memory in younger and older adults by presenting participants with lists of words paired with point values counting toward their score if recalled. In Experiment 1, we created a situation where there was a buildup of interference such that participants could recall words from any studied list to earn points. However, to increase participants' motivation to combat interference, we told participants that if they recalled words from previously studied lists, those words would be worth double the original point value of the word. In Experiment 2, to examine age-related differences in the absence of any interference, participants studied and were tested on the same set of words throughout several study-test cycles. The buildup of interference caused by participants needing to recall both just-studied and previously studied words in Experiment 1 impaired selectivity in older adults relative to younger adults and this effect was particularly pronounced when considering the recall of just prior-list words. However, in the absence of interference, there was not an overall recall deficit or any selectivity impairments in older adults. Thus, proactive and retroactive interference seem to be largely responsible for age-related deficits in selective memory for important information.

False memories formation after a retention period spent asleep or awake in individuals with insomnia and good sleepers: a polysomnographic study

False memories are a possible by-product of sleep-related memory consolidation processes when delayed testing is performed after a retention interval spent asleep. To date, the effect of a retention period spent asleep or awake on false memories formation has been addressed only in healthy subjects, while neglecting sleep-disordered populations. In the present study, we investigated this effect in 17 insomniacs and 15 good sleepers through the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. In both groups, the encoding phase was followed by an 8-h retention period spent in polysomnography monitored sleep (S-condition) or wake (WK-condition). We observed that, at free recall, insomniacs produced more false recalls in the WK-condition compared to the S-condition, whereas the good sleepers showed more false recalls in S-condition than in the WK-condition. Moreover, false recalls were higher in good sleepers than in insomniacs in the S-condition. Both groups produced more veridical recalls in the S-condition than in the WK-condition. For recognition, hits (correctly recognised words) were more numerous in the S-condition than in the WK-condition. Our results confirm previous data on sleep-related false memories production in good sleepers. Additionally, they show that, in insomniacs, false memories production is reduced after a sleep relative to remaining awake. These data suggest that false memories formation, reflecting adaptive memory reshaping processes going on during sleep, could occur at awakening as long as the sleep episode is efficient enough. A notable methodological issue was also identified, in that the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm can be useful to investigate sleep-dependent memory processes for false memories only when a more cognitively demanding task is employed (i.e., free-recall instead of recognition tasks).

Memory capacity and prioritization in female mice

Our brain's capacity for memory storage may be vast but is still finite. Given that we cannot remember the entirety of our experiences, how does our brain select what to remember and what to forget? Much like the triage of a hospital's emergency room, where urgent cases are prioritized and less critical patients receive delayed or even no care, the brain is believed to go through a similar process of memory triage. Recent salient memories are prioritized for consolidation, which helps create stable, long-term representations in the brain; less salient memories receive a lower priority, and are eventually forgotten if not sufficiently consolidated (Stickgold and Walker in Nat Neurosci 16(2):139-145, 2013). While rodents are a primary model for studying memory consolidation, common behavioral tests typically rely on a limited number of items or contexts, well within the memory capacity of the subject. A memory test allowing us to exceed an animal's memory capacity is key to investigating how memories are selectively strengthened or forgotten. Here we report a new serial novel object recognition task designed to measure memory capacity and prioritization, which we test and validate using female mice.

Reinforcer value moderates the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on learning and reversal

Introduction

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) are the leading cause of preventable developmental disability and are commonly characterized by alterations in executive function. Reversal learning tasks are reliable, cross-species methods for testing a frequently impaired aspect of executive control, behavioral flexibility. Pre-clinical studies commonly require the use of reinforcers to motivate animals to learn and perform the task. While there are several reinforcers available, the most commonly employed are solid (food pellets) and liquid (sweetened milk) rewards. Previous studies have examined the effects of different solid rewards or liquid dietary content on learning in instrumental responding and found that rodents on liquid reward with higher caloric content performed better with increased response and task acquisition rate. The influence of reinforcer type on reversal learning and how this interacts with developmental insults such as prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has not been explored.

Methods

We tested whether reinforcer type during learning or reversal would impact an established deficit in PAE mice.

Results

We found that all male and female mice on liquid reward, regardless of prenatal exposure were better motivated to learn task behaviors during pre-training. Consistent with previous findings, both male and female PAE mice and Saccharine control mice were able to learn the initial stimulus reward associations irrespective of the reinforcer type. During the initial reversal phase, male PAE mice that received pellet rewards exhibited maladaptive perseverative responding whereas male mice that received liquid rewards performed comparable to their control counterparts. Female PAE mice that received either reinforcer types did not exhibit any deficits on behavioral flexibility. Female saccharine control mice that received liquid, but not pellet, rewards showed increased perseverative responding during the early reversal phase.

Discussion

These data suggest that reinforcer type can have a major impact on motivation, and therefore performance, during reversal learning. Highly motivating rewards may mask behavioral deficits seen with more moderately sought rewards and gestational exposure to the non-caloric sweetener, saccharine, can impact behavior motivated by those reinforcers in a sex-dependent manner.

The relationship between self, value-based reward, and emotion prioritisation effects

People show systematic biases in perception, memory, attention, and decision-making to prioritise information related to self, reward, and positive emotion. A long-standing set of experimental findings points towards putative common properties of these effects. However, the relationship between them remains largely unknown. Here, we addressed this question by assessing and linking these prioritisation effects generated by a common associative matching procedure in three experiments. Self, reward, and positive emotion prioritisation effects were assessed using cluster and shift function analyses to explore and test associations between these effects across individuals. Cluster analysis revealed two distinct patterns of the relationship between the biases. Individuals with faster responses showed a smaller reward and linear positive association between reward and emotion biases. Individuals with slower responses demonstrated a large reward and no association between reward and emotion biases. No evidence of the relationship between self and value-based reward or positive emotion prioritisation effects was found among the clusters. A shift function indicated a partial dominance of high-reward over low-reward distributions at later processing stages in participants with slower but not faster responses. Full stochastic dominance of self-relevance over others and positive over neutral emotion was pertinent to each subgroup of participants. Our findings suggest the independent origin of the self-prioritisation effect. In contrast, commonalities in cognitive mechanisms supporting value-based reward and positive emotion processing are subject to individual differences. These findings add important evidence to a steadily growing research base about the relationship between basic behavioural drivers.

Empathy, memory, and aging during the COVID-19 pandemic

Recently, there has been increasing attention to the interaction between empathy and memory. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period when empathy played a key role in people's behaviors, we assessed the relationship between empathy and memory. In this pre-registered report, we used memory accuracy for the number of COVID-19 cases as a measure of recent memory and examined its relationship with trait empathy. Moreover, we investigated whether cognitive vs. affective empathy differently associate with one's memory for the number of COVID-19 cases, given evidence for distinct mechanisms for the two aspects of empathy. Finally, we assessed how age is related to empathy-memory associations. To address these questions, we used the Boston College COVID-19 Dataset, which included surveys assessing dispositional empathy and memory for the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases during the first wave of the pandemic. Empathy was not associated with memory accuracy for the confirmed cases when using an empathy measure that combined both cognitive and affective empathy. However, when using a measure that separately assessed cognitive and affective empathy, only affective empathy, specifically the personal distress subscale, was associated with greater memory accuracy. There was no age-related difference in memory accuracy despite age-related decreases in affective empathy. Results suggest that individuals with greater affective empathy (i.e., greater tendency to feel discomfort by the suffering of others) can have more accurate memory for details of an ongoing empathy-evoking situation. Findings are discussed in the context of motivation and emotional arousal. The current study provides ecological evidence to corroborate the interplay of empathy and memory.

Strategic metacognition: Self-paced study time and responsible remembering

Metacognition involves the understanding and awareness of one's cognitive processes, and responsible remembering is the notion that people strategically focus on and remember important information to prevent negative consequences for forgetting. The present study examined the metacognitive control processes involved in responsible remembering by evaluating how information importance affects one's allocation of study time and subsequent recall. Specifically, participants were presented with pictures of children along with each child's food preferences (2 foods they like, 2 foods they dislike, and 2 foods they are allergic to and must avoid) to remember for a later test. When making no metacognitive assessments or judging the likelihood of later remembering each food preference (JOL), participants did not strategically study or demonstrate enhanced recall for the most important information (allergies). However, when making judgments of importance (at either the item or global level), participants spent more time studying and best recalled the information that they rated as most important to remember (allergies). Collectively, these results suggest that when people judge the importance of remembering information, whether at the global or item level, study decisions are better informed, resulting in strategic studying and greater recall for information with the most severe consequences for forgetting.

Biased confabulation in risky choice

When people make risky decisions based on past experience, they must rely on memory. The nature of the memory representations that support these decisions is not yet well understood. A key question concerns the extent to which people recall specific past episodes or whether they have learned a more abstract rule from their past experience. To address this question, we examined the precision of the memories used in risky decisions-from-experience. In three pre-registered experiments, we presented people with risky options, where the outcomes were drawn from continuous ranges (e.g., 100-190 or 500-590), and then assessed their memories for the outcomes experienced. In two preferential tasks, people were more risk seeking for high-value than low-value options, choosing as though they overweighted the outcomes from more extreme ranges. Moreover, in two preferential tasks and a parallel evaluation task, people were very poor at recalling the exact outcomes encountered, but rather confabulated outcomes that were consistent with the outcomes they had seen and were biased towards the more extreme ranges encountered. This common pattern suggests that the observed decision bias in the preferential task reflects a basic cognitive process to overweight extreme outcomes in memory. These results highlight the importance of the edges of the distribution in providing the encoding context for memory recall. They also suggest that episodic memory influences decision-making through gist memory and not through direct recall of specific instances.

Selective remembering and directed forgetting are influenced by similar stimulus properties

Do the properties of to-be-remembered events influence the ability to remember, and also intentionally forget, these events in similar ways? Prior work has examined how the font size, animacy, emotionality, concreteness (the degree to which a word denotes something perceptible), frequency (how often a word appears in language), and length of to-be-remembered words influence memory. However, it was previously unclear whether the forgetting of information is also influenced by these characteristics. In six experiments, we used an item-method directed forgetting task where we presented participants with to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten words varying in font size (large or small), animacy (animate or inanimate), emotionality (negative or neutral), concreteness (high or low), frequency (high or low), and word length (long or short). Results revealed that animacy, emotionality, concreteness, frequency, and word length (but not font size) influenced both remembering and forgetting. Together, the present findings indicate that the characteristics of presented words can influence remembering as well as directed forgetting, providing further evidence that the remembering and forgetting processes are governed by similar properties.

The Influence of Social Isolation on Social Orientation, Sociability, Social Novelty Preference, and Hippocampal Parvalbumin-Expressing Interneurons in Peripubertal Rats – Understanding the Importance of Meeting Social Needs in Adolescence

The fulfillment of belonging needs underlies a variety of behaviors. In order to understand how social needs unmet during maturation shape everyday life, we examined social motivation and cognition in peripubertal rats, as a rodent model of adolescence, subjected to social isolation (SI) during early and early-to-mid adolescence. The behavioral correlates of social orientation (social space preference), sociability (preference for social over non-social novelty), and social novelty preference (SNP) were examined in group-housed (GH) and single-housed (SH) rats in a 3-chamber test. The response to social odors was examined to gain insights into the developmental role of social odors in motivated social behavior. Differentiation between appetitive (number of visits/approaches) and consummatory (exploratory time) aspects of motivated social behavior was done to determine which facet of social motivation characterizes maturation when social needs are met and which aspect dominates when social needs are unsatisfied. The SI-sensitive parvalbumin-expressing interneurons (PVI) in the hippocampus were examined using immunohistochemistry. The main findings are the following: (1) in GH rats, the preference for social space is not evident regardless of animals’ age, while sociability becomes apparent in mid-adolescence strictly through consummatory behavior, along with complete SNP (appetitive, consummatory); (2) SH promotes staying in a social chamber/space regardless of animals’ age and produces an appetitive preference for it only in early-adolescent animals; (3) SH promotes sociability (appetitive, consummatory) regardless of the animals’ age and prevents the SNP; (4) the preference for a social odor is displayed in all the groups through consummatory behavior, while appetitive behavior is evident only in SH rats; (5) the response to social odors does not commensurate directly to the response to conspecifics; (6) SH does not influence PVI in the hippocampus, except in the case of early-adolescence when a transient decrease in the dentate gyrus is observed. These results accentuate the developmental complexity of social motivation and cognition, and the power of SI in adolescence to infringe social maturation at different functional levels, promoting appetitive behavior toward peers overall but harming the interest for social novelty. The findings emphasize the importance of the fulfillment of basic social needs in the navigation through the social world.

The Ambivalent Students’ Cognition to Be English Teachers for Young Learners: A Longitudinal Study

This longitudinal study analyzed university students’ cognition in learning an English for young learners (EYL) course. A qualitative method was used to get the data from 28 students who took the tiered EYL courses, EYL 1, EYL 2, and EYL 3, at a private university by giving them open-ended questionnaires for three semesters, or one and a half years. Semi-structured interviews with those 28 students were also used as the triangulation data at the end of each semester. The findings indicate a very extreme change in pre-service teachers’ cognition, such as motivation, perception, and belief. At the end of their lecture, students initially interested in learning English for young learners did not want to become EYL teachers. On the other hand, students who enrolled in the EYL course for non-academic reasons wanted to have a profession as an EYL teacher after completing the EYL courses. It proves that students’ interest in teaching English to young learners and the length of time spent studying EYL teaching knowledge do not assure those pre-service teachers are increasingly convinced to have a teaching profession.

Memory and Reward-Based Learning: A Value-Directed Remembering Perspective

The ability to prioritize valuable information is critical for the efficient use of memory in daily life. When information is important, we engage more effective encoding mechanisms that can better support retrieval. Here, we describe a dual-mechanism framework of value-directed remembering in which both strategic and automatic processes lead to differential encoding of valuable information. Strategic processes rely on metacognitive awareness of effective deep encoding strategies that allow younger and healthy older adults to selectively remember important information. In contrast, some high-value information may also be encoded automatically in the absence of intention to remember, but this may be more impaired in older age. These different mechanisms are subserved by different neural substrates, with left-hemisphere semantic processing regions active during the strategic encoding of high-value items, and automatic enhancement of encoding of high-value items may be supported by activation of midbrain dopaminergic projections to the hippocampal region. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The role of attention and ageing in the retrieval dynamics of value-directed remembering

For memory to be efficient, people need to remember important information. This involves selective encoding and retrieval operations to maximise the recall of valuable information at the expense of less important information. While past research has examined this in terms of strategic encoding operations, we investigated differences in the dynamics of retrieval in value-directed remembering tasks with younger adults under full and divided attention during encoding as well as in older adults. Participants typically initiated recall with the first presented, last presented, or highest valued words and also strategically organised retrieval according to information value such that high-value words tended to be recalled before low-value words. However, the average value of older adults' first recalled word was greater than that of younger adults, likely contributing to their enhanced selectivity. In addition, there were no differences in lag-conditional-response probabilities in younger adults under full or divided attention, but older adults showed impairments in the retrieval of items sharing contextual features with nearby items, while younger adults relied more on temporal-contextual cues to recall words. Together, this study suggests that both strategic encoding and strategic retrieval operations contribute to selectivity for valuable information and older adults may be able to maximise retrieval operations despite displaying impairments in temporal binding during encoding and an overall recall deficit.

Effect of non-instructed instrumental contingency of monetary reward and positive affect in a cognitive control task

In recent years, we observed a strong interest in the influence of motivation and emotion on cognitive control. Prior studies suggest that the instrumental contingency between a response and a rewarding or affective stimulus is particularly important in that context-which is resonating with observations in the associative learning literature. However, despite this overlap, and the relevance of non-instructed learning in real life, the vast majority of studies investigating motivation-cognition interactions use direct instructions to inform participants about the contingencies between responses and stimuli. Thus, there is little experimental insight regarding how humans detect non-instructed contingencies between their actions and motivational or affective outcomes, and how these learned contingencies come to influence cognitive control processes. In an attempt to close this gap, the goal of the present study was to test the effect of non-instructed contingent and non-contingent outcomes (i.e. monetary reward and positive affective stimuli) on cognitive control using the AX-continuous performance task (AX-CPT) paradigm. We found that entirely non-instructed contingencies between responses and positive outcomes (both monetary and affective ones) led to significant performance improvement. The present results open new perspectives for studying the influence of motivation and emotion on cognitive control at the insertion with associative learning.

The Role of Motivation and Anxiety on Error Awareness in Younger and Older Adults

Aging is associated with several changes in cognitive functions, as well as in motivational and affective processes, which in turn interact with cognitive functions. The present study aimed to investigate error awareness (EA), which declines with aging, in relation to motivation and anxiety. Adopting an experimental task, we firstly tested the hypothesis that EA could be enhanced through reward motivation. Secondly, we explored the relation between state and trait anxiety and EA, investigating the hypothesis of an association between EA and anxiety, and between anxiety and the potential benefit of motivation on EA. Thirty healthy younger (age range: 19-35 years; mean age 25.4 ± 5.1; 10 M) and 30 healthy older adults (age range: 61-83 years; mean age 69.7 ± 5.5; 12 M) took part in the study and performed both the classic Error Awareness Task (EAT) and one experimental task, called the Motivational EAT. In this new task, motivational incentives were delivered after aware correct responses and aware errors. For every participant, standard measures of state and trait anxiety and cognitive functions were collected. Confirming the presence of a significant age-related EA decline, results did not reveal any influence of reward motivation on EA, nor any relation between EA and anxiety. However, both younger and older adults had longer response times (RTs) and made more errors during the Motivational EAT, with the more anxious participants showing the greater RT slowing. Findings suggest that reward motivation might not be always beneficial for cognitive performance, as well as that anxiety does not relate to EA capacity. Results also recommend further investigation, as well as the assessment of EA in patients with either motivational deficits like apathy, and/or with anxiety disorders.

Expecting the good: Symbolic valence signals provoke action biases and undermine goal-directed behavior

Positive and negative events are known to trigger opposing action tendencies (approach vs. avoidance). Recently, we found that advance monetary incentive cues can override such valence-action biases. In the present study we tested whether symbolic emotional valence cues can lead to similar adjustments and facilitate performance regardless of the required action. To this end, we performed three closely related experiments in which valence prospect (positive vs. neutral; indicated by stimulus color) and action requirements (approach vs. avoid; indicated by stimulus shape) were manipulated in a trial-to-trial fashion. Orthogonal to this, valence prospect was either embedded in the cue or target stimulus in discrete blocks (cue-valence vs. target-valence blocks). Actual valence was presented in the form of emotional face stimuli after response execution, which mirrors monetary incentive manipulations. In two of the experiments, we observed a positive-approach bias in form of performance benefit for positive versus neutral valence trials, which was exclusive for approach actions. Although numerically more pronounced in target-valence blocks, the bias was not significantly diminished in cue- versus target-valence blocks. This opposes our prediction that emotional valence cues can diminish such biases and instead highlights the robustness of inherent mappings between emotional valence and action tendencies - even if this goes against the task goal.

Expected Value of Reward Predicts Episodic Memory for Incidentally Learnt Reward-Item Associations

In this paper, we draw connections between reward processing and cognition by behaviourally testing the implications of neurobiological theories of reward processing on memory. Single-cell neurophysiology in non-human primates and imaging work in humans suggests that the dopaminergic reward system responds to different components of reward: expected value; outcome or prediction error; and uncertainty of reward (Schultz et al., 2008). The literature on both incidental and motivated learning has focused on understanding how expected value and outcome—linked to increased activity in the reward system—lead to consolidation-related memory enhancements. In the current study, we additionally investigate the impact of reward uncertainty on human memory. The contribution of reward uncertainty—the spread of the reward probability distribution irrespective of the magnitude—has not been previously examined. To examine the effects of uncertainty on memory, a word-learning task was introduced, along with a surprise delayed recognition memory test. Using Bayesian model selection, we found evidence only for expected value as a predictor of memory performance. Our findings suggest that reward uncertainty does not enhance memory for individual items. This supports emerging evidence that an effect of uncertainty on memory is only observed in high compared to low risk environments.

Effects of Aging on General and Specific Memory for Impressions

Despite the number of documented declines in memory with age, memory for socioemotional information can be preserved into older adulthood. These studies assessed whether memory for character information could be preserved with age, and how the general versus specific nature of the information tested affected outcomes. We hypothesized that memory for general impressions would be preserved with age, but that memory for specific details would be impaired. In two experiments, younger and older adults learned character information about individuals characterized as positive, neutral, or negative. Participants then retrieved general impressions and specific information for each individual. The testing conditions in Experiment 2 discouraged deliberate recall. In Experiment 1, we found that younger performed better than older adults on both general and specific memory measures. Although age differences in memory for specific information persisted in Experiment 2, we found that younger and older adults remembered general impressions to a similar extent when testing conditions encouraged the use of "gut impressions" rather than deliberate retrieval from memory. We conclude that aging affects memory for specific character information, but memory for general impressions can be age-equivalent. Furthermore, there is no evidence for a positivity bias or differences in the effects of valence on memory across the age groups.