Effects of Reward and Punishment on Conflict Processing: Same or Different?

Aitao Lu, Ling Yang, Shulan Hu, Yulan Shao, Honghong Zhang and Lili Liu

International Journal of Psychological Studies, 2013, vol. 5, issue 1, 22

Abstract: While it is commonly known that reward and punishment are two effective motivators of behavior, little isknown about the underlying mechanisms of reward and punishment in conflict processing. Here, we examinedwhat roles reward and punishment played in this cognitive process by using a revised version of Stroop task.Confining to incongruent trials, explicit reward association in task-relevant dimension obstructed the processingof conflict information in Experiment 1, while the explicit punishment association in task-relevant dimensionenhanced the conflict processing relative to the no-punishment condition in Experiment 2, suggesting themechanisms of reward and punishment are different from each other with the possible involvement ofparticularly used strategy. Additionally, both reward associations and punishment associations to task-irrelevantdimension showed faster response time in conflict processing, which likely reflected the roles of reward andpunishment were the same when they were implicitly related to conflict processing. Such results document thatthe effects of reward and punishment on conflict processing are modulated by the involvement of consciousness,supporting the flexible roles of reward and punishment in conflict processing.

Date: 2013
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