The Mechanism Of Self-relevance And Monetary Reward In Associative Learning

Self-relevance and monetary reward are two important social attributes that affect individual cognitive processing and behavior.Self-relevance originates from the inside of the individual and its function is stable.Money reward is abstract reward and comes from the outside of the individual.Self-relevance and money reward can promote cognitive processing from the inside and the outside respectively.Previous studies on self-relevance and monetary reward separately show that they have the same cognitive function,but there are differences in neural basis and psychological representation.However,the role and mechanism of self-relevance and monetary reward in cognitive processing need to be studied.This study explores the mechanism of self-relevance and monetary reward in associative learning from the perspectives of competition and association.Research 1 focuses on how self-relevance competes with monetary rewards.The experiment adopted the associative matching paradigm(Sui,He,& Humphreys,2012),requiring the subjects to learn five kinds of graphs and the different meanings represented by the graphs(representing self,friend,50 yuan,200 yuan and meaningless respectively).through the analysis of the data of behavior results and the activation diffusion model,the results showed that the graphs representing self under the matching condition were better than other graphs,the graphs representing none performed the worst,and the differences among the other three categories were not significant,i.e.significant self-bias appeared under the matching condition;The reaction time of self-graph is the longest under mismatched conditions,there is a tendency that self is denied difficultly.Therefore,compared with other factors,self has an independent and significant advantage.The second study focuses on the joint effect of self-relevance and monetary reward,adopts the variant of association matching paradigm,and requires the subjects to learn graphs with both self-relevance and monetary reward attributes,and then presents a learned graph and two labels with self-relevance and monetary reward attributes respectively in the judgment process.The task of the subjects is to judge whether the labels match the graphs.The results show that when self-relevance and monetary rewards occur simultaneously and have the same salience,the processing of self-high reward graph is better than other graphs,that is,self and high reward can promote the processing of subjects at the same time.When the salience is inconsistent,the self-low reward pattern is better processed when one label matches,while the stranger-high reward pattern is best processed when the labels are not completely matched,that is,the role of self-bias is greater than reward bias,and it is difficult to be denied when self appears.In the self-friend context,there is no difference between the self-low reward pattern and the friend-high reward pattern in the processing performance,that is,the role of self-bias is relatively reduced while the role of reward bias is relatively increased.To sum up,individuals have independent and significant self-bias.The combination of high self-relevance and high monetary reward can jointly promote cognitive processing.Interpersonal distance affects the size of self-relevance and monetary reward.The self-bias is greater in the context of large interpersonal distance(self-stranger)and the reward bias is relatively greater in the context of small interpersonal distance(self-friend).