The Influence Of Dynamic Change In Reward Value On Cognitive Control

With the development of human society,environmental stimuli in individual life are no longer invariable.Compared with the stable environmental stimuli,changed environmental stimuli may have different effects on human performance.As a kind of common stimuli in human daily life,reward has an important influence on human cognition and behavior.Understanding how reward modulates human behavior and information processing has been a core challenge for psychologists for decades.As a research hotspot in the cognitive field,cognitive control is closely related to many human complex behaviors,such as updating task settings in a changing environment(cognitive flexibility),or maintaining goals in the face of irrelevant stimuli(cognitive stability).Cognitive flexibility and cognitive stability are important parts of cognitive control,and a large number of studies have explored the influence of reward value on them in recent years,but researchers mainly concentrated on the different effects between high reward and low reward.Some studies have pointed out that the importance of reward value's dynamic changes when exploring the influence of reward on cognitive control,such as reward increase and reward decrease(changed environmental stimuli),reward remain high and reward remain low(stable environmental stimuli).At present,the research about the influence of dynamic changes in reward value on cognitive control is rare,and we should further validate the correctness of this argument and explore the related mechanism.Two behavioral experiments were run by manipulating the reward sequence in our study.Experiment 1 used the task switching paradigm to explore the influence of different reward sequence on cognitive flexibility.Twenty-seven participants joined the experiment(including 17 girls and 10 boys),and every participant executed eight experimental conditions: four kinds of reward sequence(reward increase,reward remain high,reward decrease,reward remain low)and 2 kinds of task type(task switch,task repetition).We recorded their response time and the error rate.The results of repeated measurement variance analysis showed that reward increase could promote individual cognitive flexibility compared with the reward remain high conditions.Reward decrease could also promote individual cognitive flexibility compared with the reward remain low conditions.And one's sensitivity toward money could regulate the influence of reward sequence on cognitive flexibility.Based on the results of experiment1,experiment 2 used the experimental paradigm which combined with distractor inhibition task and switch task to explore the reason why cognitive flexibility changed under these kinds of reward conditions.It also means to explore the influence of dynamic changes in reward value on individual cognitive flexibility-stability trade-offs.This experiment selected 25 participants(including 17 girls and 8 boys),and every participant executed 12 experimental conditions: four kinds of reward sequence(reward increase,reward remain high,reward decrease,reward remain low)and 3 kinds of task type(ongoing task,distractor inhibition task,switch task).We recorded their response time and the error rate.The results of repeated measurement variance analysis showed that reward increase could promote individual cognitive flexibility at the cost of damaging cognitive stability compared with the reward remain high condition.Reward decrease also could promote individual cognitive flexibility at the cost of reducing the cognitive stability compared with the reward remain low condition.And the one's sensitivity toward money cloud regulate the influence of reward sequence on cognitive flexibility-stability trade-offs.In summary,reward increase and reward decrease can enhance one's cognitive flexibility,and reward remain high and reward remain low can enhance one's cognitive stability.Our results presented here nicely complement researches on the reward's modulation of the cognitive control.