The influence of rewards on incidental memory: more does not mean better
- 1Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
- 2Department of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA
- 3CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Beijing 100101, China
- Corresponding author: zhangmx{at}psych.ac.cn
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↵4 These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
Studies have revealed that rewards promote long-term memory, even in an incidental way. However, most previous studies using the incidental paradigm have included two reward levels, and it is still not clear how the reward magnitude influences memory. Adopting the incidental paradigm and three reward levels, the current study revealed that the reward magnitude impacted 1-d delayed episodic memory in a nonlinear, inverted U-shaped pattern. An additional experiment showed that there was no reward effect in immediate episodic memory. Our results support the dopaminergic memory consolidation theory and further imply that the reward magnitude needs to be considered in the theory.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.051722.120.
- Received March 25, 2020.
- Accepted September 1, 2020.
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