Improving perceptual decision making through monetary rewards - The influence of monetary rewards on performance and attentional effort in a visual selective attention task

Intuitively, most people assume that offering monetary rewards is a good way to motivate others to increase their performance. In contrast to this assumption, however, the experimental evidence is mixed: although rewards do sometimes increase performance, the most common result is that they do not have any measurable effect at all. In the present work, this issue is investigated in the context of visual perceptual decision making. Using a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, it is demonstrated over the course of 6 experiments that rewards can and do improve performance, although this requires rather specific conditions.

About the author

PhD, studied psychology at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Following his studies, he obtained his doctoral degree at the Center for Psychoeconomics (University of Konstanz) in 2011.

Product details

• Authors: Jan Schlösser
• Publisher: Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 05.01.2012
• EAN: 9783838130477
• ISBN: 978-3-8381-3047-7
• No. of pages: 152
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Psychology; Non-fiction book > Psychology, esoterics, spirituality, anthroposophy > Applied psychology