Abstract
Recently we showed that higher reward results in increased pupil dilation during listening (listening effort). Remarkably, this effect was not accompanied with improved speech reception. Still, increased listening effort may reflect more in-depth processing, potentially resulting in a better memory representation of speech. Here, we investigated this hypothesis by also testing the effect of monetary reward on recognition memory performance. Twenty-four young adults performed speech reception threshold (SRT) tests, either hard or easy, in which they repeated sentences uttered by a female talker masked by a male talker. We recorded the pupil dilation response during listening. Participants could earn a high or low reward and the four conditions were presented in a blocked fashion. After each SRT block, participants performed a visual sentence recognition task. In this task, the sentences that were presented in the preceding SRT task were visually presented in random order and intermixed with unfamiliar sentences. Participants had to indicate whether they had previously heard the sentence or not. The SRT and sentence recognition were affected by task difficulty but not by reward. Contrary to our previous results, peak pupil dilation did not reflect effects of reward. However, post-hoc time course analysis (GAMMs) revealed that in the hard SRT task, the pupil response was larger for high than low reward. We did not observe an effect of reward on visual sentence recognition. Hence, the current results provide no conclusive evidence that the effect of monetary reward on the pupil response relates to the memory encoding of speech.
Highlights
The Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL, Pichora-Fuller et al, 2016), postulates that the amount of effort expended during listening depends on our motivation to achieve goals and attain rewards
The results showed a larger peak pupil dilation (PPD), indicating more effort, while processing spoken sentences in a high compared to a low reward condition
Average outcomes for the visual sentence recognition task as function of the reward and difficulty conditions in the preceding speech reception threshold (SRT) tasks are presented in Table 2 and Fig. 1B
Summary
The Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL, Pichora-Fuller et al, 2016), postulates that the amount of effort expended during listening depends on our motivation to achieve goals and attain rewards. The results showed a larger peak pupil dilation (PPD), indicating more effort, while processing spoken sentences in a high compared to a low reward condition. These results are consistent with Richter (2016) who showed an effect of reward on pre-ejection period (PEP) reactivity, an indicator of sympathetic activity and associated with effort, in a difficult task condition. A study by Bijleveld et al (2009) showed an effect of reward on the PPD when participants had to listen to, memorize, and report back 2 or 5 digits Together these studies provide compelling evidence showing that monetary reward can affect the amount of effort spent during a listening task
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