Rewards transiently and automatically enhance sustained attention.

ABSTRACT: Our ability to maintain a consistent attentional state is essential to many aspects of daily life. Still, despite our best efforts, attention naturally fluctuates between more and less vigilant states. Previous work has shown that offering performance-based rewards or incentives can help to buffer against attentional lapses. However, such work is generally focused on long timescales and, critically, does not dissociate between task-based motivation (i.e., where reward is contingent on attention performance) versus more generic motivation or arousal accounts of reward effects. Here, we investigated the influence of reward feedback on attentional vigilance during a simultaneous sustained attention and reinforcement learning (RL) task. Crucially, rewards were tied only to the RL task rather t

SUBMITTER: Trach JE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12403975 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature