Can cognitive discovery be incentivized with money?

IF 3.7 1区心理学 Q1 PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General Pub Date : 2025-01-20 DOI:10.1037/xge0001682

Pamela J Osborn Popp,Ben R Newell,Daniel M Bartels,Todd M Gureckis

引用次数: 0

Abstract

The ability to discover patterns or rules from our experiences is critical to science, engineering, and art. In this article, we examine how much people's discovery of patterns can be incentivized by financial rewards. In particular, we investigate a classic category learning task for which the effect of financial incentives is unknown (Shepard et al., 1961). Across five experiments, we find no effect of incentive on rule discovery performance. However, in a sixth experiment requiring category recognition but not learning, we find a large effect of incentives on response time and a small effect on task performance. Participants appear to apply more effort in valuable contexts, but the effort is disproportionate with the performance improvement. Taken together, the results suggest that performance in tasks that require novel inductive insights is relatively immune to financial incentives, while tasks that require rote perseverance of a fixed strategy are more malleable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

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认知发现可以用金钱来激励吗？

从我们的经验中发现模式或规则的能力对科学、工程和艺术至关重要。在这篇文章中，我们将研究人们发现的模式在多大程度上受到经济奖励的激励。特别是，我们研究了一个经典的类别学习任务，其中财务激励的影响是未知的（Shepard et al., 1961）。在五个实验中，我们发现激励对规则发现性能没有影响。然而，在第六个需要类别识别但不需要学习的实验中，我们发现激励对反应时间的影响很大，对任务表现的影响很小。参与者似乎在有价值的环境中投入了更多的努力，但这种努力与绩效的提高不成比例。综上所述，结果表明，在需要新颖归纳洞察力的任务中，表现相对不受财务激励的影响，而在需要对固定策略进行死记硬背的任务中，表现则更具可塑性。（PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA，版权所有）。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL-

CiteScore

6.20

自引率

4.90%

发文量

300

期刊介绍： The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General publishes articles describing empirical work that bridges the traditional interests of two or more communities of psychology. The work may touch on issues dealt with in JEP: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, JEP: Human Perception and Performance, JEP: Animal Behavior Processes, or JEP: Applied, but may also concern issues in other subdisciplines of psychology, including social processes, developmental processes, psychopathology, neuroscience, or computational modeling. Articles in JEP: General may be longer than the usual journal publication if necessary, but shorter articles that bridge subdisciplines will also be considered.