Incentive Effects Of Inhibitory Control Processing Eye Movement Research

Drawing on advantages and avoiding disadvantages are the products of human evolution, regardless of positive or negative, the incentives are affecting individual’s survival and development all the time. Recently studies showed that incentive (reward and punishment) related processing could regulate inhibitory control in human beings, but how it affects and what the difference between reward and punishment are still unclear.In current study, we investigated the influences of monetary reward and punishment on the inhibitory control behaviors of adults with antisaccade task in experiment1. Here we conducted2(saccade type: prosaccades, antisaccade)×3(incentive value:reward, punishment, and neutral) within-subjects design,22graduates and undergraduates participated in this experiment. The results showed that: participants’antisaccade accuracy increased under punishment conditions compared to the neutral condition (without incentives), and reward increased prosaccades accuracy, reduced latency; the reward prolonged the direction error saccade latency in antisaccades. The pattern was consistent with the results of Jazbec et al.(2006). It suggested that reward could improve the performance in prosaccades while punishment might optimize adults’inhibitory control in antisaccade task.However, it requires at least two processes to succeed on an antisaccade trial:the inhibition of a spontaneous saccade towards the target and use of the obtained rules to produce a saccade to the opposite direction, in which, inhibition is the most important process. In everyday life, there are also some conditions where the information of incentive and task type are needed to be separated, so take these above in account, what the effect of incentive on inhibition?The second experiment investigated the fluent of monetary incentive (incentive titer: reward, punishment, and neutral) on the suppression of a spontaneous saccade towards the target with go/no-go task. Results:under reward and punishment conditions, participants’no-go accuracy increased, and the later had a stronger effect, go peak velocity also increased under incentive conditions. However, the direction error saccade latency and peak velocity had no changes in no-go responses. These results demonstrated that incentives, especially the punishment, can modulate inhibitory control.From the two experiments, we conclude that incentives can modulate the process of human’s behaviors, the effects of reward and punishment are different:reward had a stronger effect on approach behaviors and punishment had a stronger effect on inhibitory control. The results suggest that the influence of reward and punishment on the inhibitory control is stable, and provide further evidence for the regulation of incentives on human being.