Abstract
In their seminal paper ‘Is our self nothing but reward’, Northoff and Hayes (Biol Psychiatry 69(11):1019–1025, Northoff, Hayes, Biological Psychiatry 69(11):1019–1025, 2011) proposed three models of the relationship between self and reward and opened a continuing debate about how these different fields can be linked. To date, none of the proposed models received strong empirical support. The present study tested common and distinct effects of personal relevance and reward values by de-componenting different stages of perceptual decision making using a drift-diffusion approach. We employed a recently developed associative matching paradigm where participants (N = 40) formed mental associations between five geometric shapes and five labels referring personal relevance in the personal task, or five shape-label pairings with different reward values in the reward task and then performed a matching task by indicating whether a displayed shape-label pairing was correct or incorrect. We found that common effects of personal relevance and monetary reward were manifested in the facilitation of behavioural performance for high personal relevance and high reward value as socially important signals. The differential effects between personal and monetary relevance reflected non-decisional time in a perceptual decision process, and task-specific prioritization of stimuli. Our findings support the parallel processing model (Northoff & Hayes, Biol Psychiatry 69(11):1019–1025, Northoff, Hayes, Biological Psychiatry 69(11):1019–1025, 2011) and suggest that self-specific processing occurs in parallel with high reward processing. Limitations and further directions are discussed.
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Notes
Following Christoff, Cosmelli, Legrand and Thompson (2011), we define the term ‘self-relevance’ as a processing requiring one to evaluate or judge some feature in relation to self. The self in this context reflects our ability to form a mental association between self and an object and includes a memorial component (Gallagher, 2000).
A number of trials in the training stage was determined by previous studies (Sui et al., 2012) and a pilot study with 5 participants.
Fitting the diffusion model to responses in mismatched trials is less meaningful, because different labels (e.g., mother, partner, friend, stranger) paired with a shape (e.g., for self) may contaminate accumulating evidence toward decision boundaries.
As the ttest.tstat function returns the log(e) Bayes factor against the null hypothesis, we applied the conversion formula [1/exp(BF)] to obtain the raw values for BF.
Sphericity is assumed unless otherwise specified.
MD—mean difference.
Professor G. W. Humphreys passed away after the data were collected.
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Acknowledgements
The work was supported by grants from the European Research Council (Pepe: 323883, 2013) to Professor Glyn W. HumphreysFootnote 7.
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Yankouskaya, A., Bührle, R., Lugt, E. et al. Intertwining personal and reward relevance: evidence from the drift-diffusion model. Psychological Research 84, 32–50 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-0979-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-0979-6