The unconscious and conscious foundations of human reward pursuit

Abstract

Human reward pursuit is often found to be governed by conscious assessments of expected value and required effort. Yet, research also indicates that rewards are initially valuated and processed outside awareness, using rudimentary brain structures. Building on both findings, a new framework is proposed for understanding human performance in the service of attaining rewards. In essence, this framework suggests that people initially process rewards unconsciously, which can boost effort and facilitate performance. Subsequently, people may process rewards more fully, which allows them to make strategic decisions based on task conditions, and to consciously reflect on rewards. Intriguingly, these specific processes associated with full reward processing can cause initial vs. full reward processing to have different effects on performance. This dissertation presents a formulation of this framework (Chapter 2), as well as a series of studies that support it (Chapters 3–7). All except for one of these studies make use of a experimental paradigm in which participants are presented with coins of high vs. low value, which they can earn by performing well on a task, e.g., retaining a series of digits. Importantly, these coins are sometimes presented subliminally (i.e., too briefly to be consciously perceived), allowing people to process these coins only initially. In other cases, these coins are presented supraliminally (i.e., so that they can be consciously perceived), giving people the opportunity to process them more fully. In the studies in this dissertation, this methodology is used to explore the outcomes of initial vs. full reward processing separately, in terms of effort and performance. In line with the novel framework, these studies show that initial reward processing can instigate the recruitment of effort and facilitate performance to attain the reward, outside of awareness. Yet, only when they are fully processed, people may make strategic decisions based on the reward, which may cause the effects of initial vs. full reward processing to diverge. While people’s strategic choices may sometimes help them to conserve effort and to attain rewards (e.g., Chapter 4), they can also backfire and hurt instead of help performance (e.g., Chapter 6). Furthermore, the present dissertation also provides an illustration of that such processes also occur in real life, outside the psychological laboratory. That is, a database study revealed that real-life reward cues—in this case, the trophies that are sometimes displayed near the tennis court during finals of professional tournaments—affects performance of tennis players as can be predicted from the ideas that are described in and supported by the present dissertation (Chapter 7). Taken together, the present dissertation has important implications for the field of human motivation to pursue rewards, as it provides a framework for understanding how unconscious and conscious processes together shape reward pursuit. Furthermore, it describes a useful method for disentangling and studying these processes. This dissertation has thus has led to several new insights. But perhaps more importantly, it bears promising fruits for future work