Reward Withdrawal Research Articles

The brain correlates of the effects of monetary and verbal rewards on intrinsic motivation

Apart from everyday duties, such as doing the laundry or cleaning the house, there are tasks we do for pleasure and enjoyment. We do such tasks, like solving crossword puzzles or reading novels, without any external pressure or force; instead, we are intrinsically motivated: we do the tasks because we enjoy doing them. Previous studies suggest that external rewards, i.e., rewards from the outside, affect the intrinsic motivation to engage in a task: while performance-based monetary rewards are perceived as controlling and induce a business-contract framing, verbal rewards praising one's competence can enhance the perceived self-determination. Accordingly, the former have been shown to decrease intrinsic motivation, whereas the latter have been shown to increase intrinsic motivation. The present study investigated the neural processes underlying the effects of monetary and verbal rewards on intrinsic motivation in a group of 64 subjects applying functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that, when participants received positive performance feedback, activation in the anterior striatum and midbrain was affected by the nature of the reward; compared to a non-rewarded control group, activation was higher while monetary rewards were administered. However, we did not find a decrease in activation after reward withdrawal. In contrast, we found an increase in activation for verbal rewards: after verbal rewards had been withdrawn, participants showed a higher activation in the aforementioned brain areas when they received success compared to failure feedback. We further found that, while participants worked on the task, activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex was enhanced after the verbal rewards were administered and withdrawn.

Ruling by Favors: Prison Guards' Informal Exercise of Institutional Control

This ethnographic research addresses the control strategies employed by Norwegian guards in everyday interactions with inmates under institutional conditions in which the use of official negative sanctions is restricted. The article explains how a complicated informal system of favors develops that forms a new basis for punishment through the withdrawal of rewards. By distributing favors liberally, giving an inmate only what he is entitled to serves as a substitute for negative sanctions. Inmates are not opposing the informal system, and its effect on ensuring institutional control does not challenge the intentions of formal prison rules. Still, the informal system must be monitored and protected against overuse by inmates and must also be kept hidden from the officials making up the prison administration who oppose all departures from the official rules.

Effect of reinforcement, reinforcer omission and extinction on a communicative response in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris)

There is a controversy about the mechanisms involved in the interspecific communicative behaviour in domestic dogs. The main question is whether this behaviour is a result of instrumental learning or higher cognitive skills are required. The present investigations were undertaken to study the effect of learning processes upon the gaze towards the human's face as a communicative response. To such purpose, in Study 1, gaze response was subjected to three types of reinforcement schedules: differential reinforcement, reinforcer omission, and extinction in a situation of "asking for food". Results showed a significant increase in gaze duration in the differential reinforcement phase and a significant decrease in both the omission and extinction phases. These changes were quite rapid, since they occurred only after three training trials in each phase. Furthermore, extinction resulted in animal behaviour changes, such as an increase in the distance from the experimenter, the back position and lying behaviour. This is the first systematic evaluation of the behavioural changes caused by reward withdrawal (frustration) in dogs. In Study 2, the gaze response was studied in a situation where dogs walked along with their owners/trainers. These results show that learning plays an important role in this communicative response. The possible implications of these results for service dogs are discussed.

Extinction-induced spatial dispersion in the radial arm maze: arrest by ethanol.

Adaptive changes in response to extinction can be observed if provisions are made that permit behavior to shift away from trained routine. In the present case, the baiting of four arms in the eight-arm radial maze increasingly restricted subject movements to those arms. The unbaited arms afforded a new direction for behavior to take during extinction. Withdrawal of reward was followed by an immediate and active expansion of sites visited. The previously unrewarded arms were now regularly sampled. This was one consequence of extinction. The other was the well-known decline in overall rate of arm entry, whether arms were previously baited or not. Ethanol, at doses of 1.5 or 2.0 g/kg, eliminated the spatial dispersion attendant upon nonreward. It did not affect the decline in overall responsiveness. Ethanol's deletion of extinction-induced spatial variability may account for its impairment on reversal and other kinds of tasks that require a shift away from old patterns of behavior.

Effects of reward on delayed reaction time task performance of hyperactive children

This experiment was designed to investigate the effects of continuous, partial, and noncontingent schedules of reward, as well as the withdrawal of rewards, on the performance of hyperactive and normal control children on a delayed reaction time task. Although noncontingent reward resulted in faster reaction times for control subjects, performance of hyperactives deteriorated under noncontingent reward and improved when it was withdrawn. Also, reaction times of controls during extinction remained superior to baseline, whereas performance of hyperactives returned to baseline level. It was suggested that these and other findings reviewed point to an unusual sensitivity to rewards in hyperactive children.

The Effects of Four-Hour Delay of Punishment under Two Conditions of Verbal Instruction

VERNA, GARY B. The Effects of Four-Hour Delay of Punishment under Two Conditions of Verbal Instruction. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 621-624. The effects of 4-hour delay of punishment (withdrawal of reward) on response inhibition was studied with 24 fourth-grade children. The experimental groups were response-contingent punishment (group 1), 4-hour delayed punishment with minimum verbal instruction regarding the reason for punishment (group 2), and 4-hour delayed punishment with specific verbal instruction regarding the reason for punishment (group 3). Children from group 2 deviated significantly sooner, for a longer time, and more often than children from the other groups. However, no difference between groups 1 and 3 was significant. For each of 3 dependent variables the results were conclusive; a verbal expression of the punishment contingency allows the 10-year-old child to profit from 4-hour delayed punishment as much as immediate punishment, even when the delayed feedback occurs in another setting.

Septal lesions in rats and the acquisition of free-operant successive discriminations

In Experiment 1 septal and control rats received both preoperative and postoperative baseline training on food reinforcement VI schedules in the presence of two successively presented stimuli before responding was extinguished in the presence of one of the stimuli (S-). The septals showed: (1) higher asymptotic response rates in the S- stimulus; (2) higher terminal baseline response rates; and, (3) larger magnitudes of behavioral contrast. When the baseline rates of septal and normal rats were equated, the persistent responding in the S- stimulus remained whilst the difference in contrast was eliminated. In Experiment 2 it was found that if animals could perform a response in the S- stimulus which switched the stimulus and the reinforcement contingencies to those associated with S+ stimulus, then septal rats showed a higher terminal level of discriminative performance in terms of this response than controls. It is concluded that septal persistence represents a failure of response inhibition rather than a deficit in the ability to register or associate information about the withdrawal of reward and that the septal change in the magnitude of contrast is related to the elevation of the baseline response rate rather than to the occurrence of response persistence.