Effects of monetary incentives on rehearsal and on cued recall

Abstract

Words associated with high monetary incentives were better recalled than those associated with low incentives. It was found that high-incentive words were rehearsed more than low-incentive words and that the memorial advantage of high-incentive items was greater when the retrieval cues were weakly associated to the list words than when they were strong associates. It was concluded that the disproportionate amount of rehearsal given to high-incentive items led to greater elaboration or extensiveness of encoding, which in turn produced the observed memorial superiority of high-incentive items.