R3 2.18 November 22, 2024 Do Rewards Make Hard Work Less Tiring?
Offering incentives for fast, accurate performance may help people stay energized and focused while they are doing attention-demanding work.
Most of my non-R3 writing these days is about attention – how it works, its tremendous reach throughout our cognitive and neural systems, and what happens when it fails. When I talk to groups of teachers, attention also frequently takes center stage. Most of us have an intuitive sense that attention is important, especially as a driver of learning, and thus teachers tend to be keenly interested in any research or theory on what might make their students more or less attentive.
The intuitions and interest may be there, but even so, you’d be surprised at how many basic concepts and processes aren’t straightforward or well understood, even for specialists in the field. Take, for example, the seemingly simple phenomenon of mind wandering (also known as task-unrelated thoughts, or TUTs, in the research literature). As it turns out, there are multiple competing theories of exactly what triggers TUTs, none of which have yet emerged as the clear winner. The overall impacts of mind wandering are murky as well. There are some documented negative effects, as you might expect, but some positive ones mixed in with those. And that is all without getting into the actual content of the thoughts, since TUTs can range anywhere from productively planning future actions to unproductive, unpleasant rumination. It follows that mind-wandering can therefore play out in vastly different ways in terms of productivity, mood, and much more.
Something similar is true for the ways in which focus gets depleted over time, especially when people are doing demanding and/or tedious tasks. On the face of it, it seems quite simple – we get tired, we get bored, focus goes away. And yet, no one really knows whether it’s the fatigue, boredom, or other factors that are the drivers here. As a result, it’s also unclear what kinds of incentives would help hold mental fatigue at bay, or if incentives would even work at all.
This brings us to this issue’s feature article, an investigation into the effects of one specific kind of incentive on the buildup of fatigue (and the related issue of TUTs) as people engage in work that requires intense concentration, the kind that’s incompatible with distraction or daydreaming.
Before we get to that article, though, if attentiveness and vigilance are something you’re interested in, you should consider taking a look at another brand-new article titled “The metacognition of vigilance: Using self-scheduled breaks to improve sustained attention.”
In this five-experiment study, participants completed an attention-demanding and frankly tedious-looking task involving fast-paced visual judgments about dots and crosses on a screen, with the purpose of determining how control over one’s break times might affect performance. Researchers compared a condition in which there were pre-set break times with an experimental condition in which participants decided when and for how long to take breaks. Essentially, what the authors found is that when people have the ability to control exactly when and how long they take a break during this kind of work, it does produce somewhat more positive impacts of the break in terms of accuracy and attentiveness. This was especially interesting as it suggests that people have the ability to realize that their attention is flagging just in time to restore it with a break. However, the difference wasn’t dramatic; breaks had surprisingly subtle effects on performance that were mostly apparent only on the trials right after the breaks, rather than raising performance for the whole session overall.
This is an intriguing study, especially for those of us who’ve wrestled with problems like how to time and organize different activities during a long lab or class period. I didn’t choose to review it in depth for R3 mainly because the experimental procedure seemed rather far afield from the types of learning activities that R3 readers would be most interested in (a limitation the authors completely acknowledge in the discussion of the findings). The researchers also ran into the problem of their participants not opting to take enough breaks to allow the researchers to fully explore all the impacts of those breaks. I’d speculate that this had to do with the short duration of the experiment and that as far as I could tell, breaks involved sitting and doing nothing rather than having the choice of scrolling, talking to someone, going on social media or other things most of us would normally choose to do. All that said, it’s worth a read for those with a special interest in the topic. Here’s the full citation if you would like to check it out:
Patel, T. N., Yang, R., Steyvers, M., & Benjamin, A. S. (2024). The metacognition of vigilance: Using self-scheduled breaks to improve sustained attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000518
On to our main article!
Citation:
Garner, L. D., Shuman, J., & Robison, M. K. (2023). Piece-rate time-based incentives improve sustained attention. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 13(3), 342–353.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000141
Paywall or Open:
Paywall
Summary:
(This time, I’m excerpting from their general-audience summary section since this article happens to have a really nice one.)
“In the current experiments, we investigated the effects of incentives on performance on a simple sustained attention task. We proposed that leveraging time (early release from a task based on a piece-rate incentive structure) would help to increase motivation and decrease feelings of fatigue over time, which in turn would stabilize cognitive performance across time. We found that participants in the incentivized group indeed demonstrated higher motivation levels, more alertness (less fatigue), and more stable performance than participants in the control condition (no time reward).”
Research Questions:
Experiment 1:
- Does a time-based incentive (the opportunity to leave the experiment early) improve performance overall?
- Do such incentives offset the tendency for performance to degrade over time, as fatigue sets in?
- Do such incentives increase self-reported feelings of engagement and alertness?
Experiment 2:
Similar research questions as in Experiment 1, with the additional prediction that larger pupillary responses (associated with faster and more attentive processing) would be observed in the presence of time-based incentives.
Sample:
Experiment 1: 92 undergraduates recruited from the human subject pool at Arizona State University
Experiment 2: 192 undergraduates recruited from the human subject pool at University of Texas at Arlington
Method/Design:
Experiment 1: Participants completed a vigilance task in which a row of blue zeroes appeared at the center of a computer screen. At randomly determined intervals ranging from 2 to 10 seconds, the numbers began counting up like a stopwatch. This was the participant’s signal to respond by hitting the space bar as quickly as they could. The numbers would turn red, indicating the participant’s time score on that trial. All participants were told their goal was to press the spacebar within .35 seconds (350 milliseconds). In sum, the task required participants to watch the clock carefully and respond quickly in order to meet the goal. There were 125 total trials, broken into blocks of 25.
Participants were randomly assigned to the incentive (experimental) or no incentive (control) group. In the incentive group, they were told that for every successful trial (i.e., with a time under 350 milliseconds), one trial would be removed from the original 125, so that the participant could leave the experiment early. In the no-incentive group, trials and progress were tracked but did not impact the length of time that participants had to stay for the experiment.
After each block, participants rated their motivation and alertness, and every 8 trials they were also asked about any off-task thoughts they were having.
Experiment 2: This was designed similarly to Experiment 1, with an additional measurement of eye pupil size/dilation. (In previous research, pupillary responses have been shown to reliably indicate attentiveness, with greater pupil dilation being associated with cognitive effort and focused processing.)
Key Findings:
In the incentive conditions across both experiments, there was a shallower vigilance decrement – i.e., less of a decrease in performance over time. This was observed for the performance measures as well as the self-reported alertness and TUTS measures. In sum, incentives kept motivation and performance stable and elevated over time, and participants reported less steep increases in mind-wandering as the session went on.
However, in Experiment 2, effects of the incentive weren’t observed for the pupillary response measures, although these did decrease over the course of the experiment as predicted by the buildup of fatigue.
Additional analyses (mediation modeling) suggests that incentives reduce the buildup of fatigue, which then enables participants to maintain high levels of performance.
Choice Quote from the Article:
Here, we demonstrate that the perception of a reward, in this case early release from an experiment, encourages people to sustain their attention for longer time. Via mediation analysis, we observed that this effect was primarily due to a reduced sense of mental fatigue among participants who received a “reward” for good performance. These findings are consistent with accounts of sustained attention that posit a psychological—rather than physiological—mechanism to explain time-on-task deteriorations of performance.
Why it Matters:
While this study wasn’t primarily designed to be a head-to-head test of competing theories of vigilance and performance, it does add weight to the idea that mental fatigue has a lot to do with with interpretation, framing, motivation or similar sorts of psychological processes, rather than being a set-in-stone physiological process. None of this is to say that mental fatigue is something that can be postponed indefinitely through incentives, or worse, that it’s an optional state of mind that a person can simply choose not to have. But it is interesting, and also perhaps a bit of good news, that fatigue is not something that inevitably sets in after some set number of minutes. It’s also good to know that while incentives seem to help people stay energized and focused, they don’t have to be monetary or even tangible.
The potential for classroom applications are, of course, another thing that drew me to this study. Sound advice on exactly how to manage the ebb and flow of cognitive demands during a class – or online module, or other learning activity – is hard to come by, and I feel like this work gives us at least something to hang our hats on as we wrestle with that issue.
That said, I would bet that some instructors will recoil from the idea of reprieve-as-incentive, given the implication that class time, or even learning in general, is an aversive experience to be gotten over with as soon as possible. Those rare times when you dismiss a group formally and everyone hangs around to keep the conversation going are really cool - and not something I’d want to prevent through time-based incentives of one kind or another. Online, I might be less averse to the idea, but even then, I often find myself hoping that students won’t rush through the experience, even if it’s possible for them to do so.
Most Relevant For:
Tutors and study coaches; instructional designers, faculty teaching accelerated courses or those with long, demanding meeting times; researchers interested in focus and motivation
Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:
As with some of the other work I’ve read on vigilance and attention, I think we need to be careful with generalizing the task they used (hitting a timer as soon as possible after a cue) to the work students do in college courses. On the face of it, this series of essentially reaction time trials bears little resemblance to working through a writing assignment, completing a homework set, carrying out a lab assignment, or simply getting the most out of an hour-long lecture. At the same time, there probably are some underlying cognitive components that all of these activities have in common, in particular, the need to stay engaged in an effortful and not always intrinsically rewarding work flow. So while I wouldn’t dismiss this approach as irrelevant to learning, I wouldn’t consider it a perfect proxy for it either.
I also find myself coming back to that tension between going all in on the intrinsic rewards of learning, and the potential of time-based incentives to promote the focus and concentration that we know students really need. As I’ve written and spoken about quite a bit, intrinsic motivation is wonderful, but it’s not the only game in town; there are definitely times when extrinsic motivation in the short term can serve long-term, intrinsically valued goals. Perhaps it’s sometimes worth it to have students be more cognitively present for a shorter time frame, rather than spending a longer period of time in a less-engaged state. Or maybe there’s opportunity to talk transparently with students about the kinds of attention-sustaining perks and quid-pro-quos that they feel would be the most helpful, and to co-create that system together.
If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:
Conard, M. A., & Marsh, R. F. (2014). Interest level improves learning but does not moderate the effects of interruptions: An experiment using simultaneous multitasking. Learning and Individual Differences, 30, 112–117. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2013.11.004
Czikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Lindquist, S. I., & McLean, J. P. (2011). Daydreaming and its correlates in an educational environment. Learning and Individual Differences, 21(2), 158–167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2010.12.006
Patel, T. N., Yang, R., Steyvers, M., & Benjamin, A. S. (2024). The metacognition of vigilance: Using self-scheduled breaks to improve sustained attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000518
Robison, M. K., Unsworth, N., & Brewer, G. A. (2021). Examining the effects of goal-setting, feedback, and incentives on sustained attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 47(6), 869–891. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000926
Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2015). The science of mind wandering: Empirically navigating the stream of consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology, 66(1), 487–518. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych- 010814-015331
Unsworth, N., Robison, M. K., & Miller, A. L. (2021). Individual differences in lapses of attention: A latent variable analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(7), 1303–1331. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000998.supp
Welhaf, M. S., & Banks, J. B. (2024). Effects of emotional valence of mind wandering on sustained attention performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Advance online publication. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001369
File under:
Attention; distraction; mind-wandering; motivation; instructional design; incentives
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