Abstract
Previous research has shown that the prospect of attaining a reward can promote task-engagement, up-regulate attention toward reward-relevant information, and facilitate enhanced encoding of new information into declarative memory. However, past research on reward-based enhancement of declarative memory has focused primarily on paradigms in which rewards are contingent upon accurate responses. Yet, findings from test-enhanced learning show that making errors can also be useful for learning if those errors represent effortful retrieval attempts and are followed by corrective feedback. Here, we used a challenging general knowledge task to examine the effects of explicitly rewarding retrieval effort, defined as a semantically plausible answer to a question (referenced to a semantic knowledge database www.mangelslab.org/bknorms), regardless of response accuracy. In particular, we asked whether intermittent rewards following effortful incorrect responses facilitated learning from corrective feedback as measured by incidental learning outcomes on a 24–48 h delayed retest. Given that effort-contingent extrinsic rewards represent the intersection between an internal locus of control and competency, we compared participants in this “Effort” group to three other groups in a between-subjects design: a Luck group that framed rewards as related to participant-chosen lottery numbers (reward with internal control, not competence-based), a random Award group that framed rewards as computer generated (no control, not competence-based), and a Control group with no reward, but matched on all other task features. Both men and women in the Effort group showed increased self-reports of concentration and positive feelings following the receipt of rewards, as well as subjective effort on the retest, compared to the Control group. However, only women additionally exhibited performance benefits of effort framing on error correction. These benefits were found for both rewarded and non-rewarded trials, but only for correction of low confidence errors, suggesting that effort-contingent rewards produced task-level changes in motivation to learn less familiar information in women, rather than trial-level influences in encoding or consolidation. The Luck and Award groups did not demonstrate significant motivational or behavioral benefits for either gender. These results suggest that both reward context and gender are important factors contributing to the effectiveness of rewards as tools to enhance learning from errors.
Highlights
“Learning is its own greatest reward.” This statement, credited to the humanistic British writer William Hazlitt (1778–1830), epitomizes a certain educational ideal, one that values intrinsic rewards from the effort put into mastering new material, regardless of the ultimate outcome measured by external metrics of achievement
Overall Performance Prior to conducting these analyses, we established that first-test factors that might influence retest performance had been successfully equated across groups and genders
Future work might consider how persistent use of an explicit effort-contingent reward might either make a mastery approach habitual and intrinsic or, in contrast, could serve to undermine intrinsic motivation to exert effort toward difficult tasks in the same way that extrinsic motivators have been shown to reduce other types of intrinsically motivated behaviors (Deci, 1975; Deci et al, 1999, 2001). This is the first study to consider how extrinsic rewards that are effort-contingent, rather than performance-contingent, can benefit long-term memory for declarative information. It addresses the intersection of achievement motivation, reward-based learning systems, and test-enhanced learning of declarative knowledge
Summary
“Learning is its own greatest reward.” This statement, credited to the humanistic British writer William Hazlitt (1778–1830), epitomizes a certain educational ideal, one that values intrinsic rewards from the effort put into mastering new material, regardless of the ultimate outcome measured by external metrics of achievement. Given the apparent importance of effortful engagement for learning, one question is whether providing extrinsic rewards related to perceived engagement, rather than outcome, can yield the same benefits for feedbackbased learning that has been shown for intrinsic mastery-oriented mindsets (Mangels et al, 2006; Moser et al, 2011; Ochakovskaya, 2018). To this aim, the present study will focus on how rewarding students for high-quality, but incorrect responses to a series of difficult general-knowledge questions may facilitate the ability to encode corrective information and learn from those mistakes. It is possible that intermittently rewarding individuals for their competence regarding task engagement and completion, regardless of performance outcomes — essentially rewarding their “effort” to make a high quality response in a task even if their attempt was unsuccessful — should be beneficial to a difficult declarative memory task that might require sustained attention and/or where individuals might feel challenged
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