The Effect Of Reward Motivation On Automatic Response Inhibition

Reward can induce motivation and affect individual cognitive activities.Reaction inhibition refers to the ability to inhibit the response of inappropriate behaviors that are not in line with the current needs.It enables us to flexibly make the behaviors that are in line with the current goal-oriented under different circumstances.Response inhibition includes two processes:controlled response inhibition and automatic response inhibition.However,due to the limitations of previous research methods,it is difficult to distinguish the two processes.More and more studies have shown that automatic response inhibition is also very important.Reward motivation has a significant effect on response inhibition,but few studies have investigated the effect of reward motivation on automatic response inhibition.Some researchers have developed a goal-oriented automatic response inhibition paradigm,in which the process of automatic response inhibition can be well isolated through the reverse compatibility effect generated by the interaction between the compatibility of irrelevant flank letters and target letters as well as the properties of the flank letters.In this study,we combined reward cues with the goal-oriented automatic response inhibition paradigm,and conducted two experiments to investigate the effect of reward motivation on automatic response inhibition.This study consisted of two experiments,in which participants were presented with a reward cue and a non-reward cue before each trial,and both experiments included two stages:baseline and reward.In Experiment 1,we used a 2(reward condition: reward,non-reward)×2(compatibility: compatible,incompatible)×3(flank color: red-go,green-nogo,blue-neutral)intersubject design to investigate the effect of reward motivation on the inhibition of automatic response.The results of Experiment 1 showed that the flanking letters with the color of NOGO in the baseline phase would trigger automatic response inhibition,resulting in the reverse compatibility effect.In the reward stage,the nogo color flanking letters did not induce the reverse compatibility effect in both reward and non-reward cues.In addition,there was no significant difference in the response time between the "go" and "nogo" colors.In the non-reward condition,Nogo color flanking letters produced greater inhibition effect.In experiment 2,the response rules of the task were changed on the basis of experiment 1,so that the target stimulus was no longer single and fixed with a certain attribute color.On the one hand,the target color can be balanced,and on the other hand,the influence of long-term associative learning on the task can be eliminated.The effect of reward motivation on the inhibition of automatic response was further investigated by using a 2(reward condition: reward,non-reward)×2(compatibility: compatible,incompatible)×2(flanking letter type: GO,NOGO)intra subject design.The results of Experiment 2 showed that even if there was no fixed association between the target and the color of the stimulus,automatic response inhibition could be triggered,and the reverse compatibility effect was produced.The reverse compatibility effect was eliminated by reward motivation.In addition,the results of Experiment 2 also showed that reward motivation significantly changed the quality of task completion.In other words,the task under reward condition had lower error rate and faster response time.The results of this study show that reward motivation has a significant impact on automatic response inhibition,which makes the inhibition disappear.Moreover,automatic response inhibition is very sensitive to reward motivation,and it will disappear in the context of reward.These findings extend our understanding of the relationship between reward motivation and automatic response inhibition and have important theoretical implications.