Investigating Consciousness in Reward Pursuit : Comparing the Effects of Consciously and Unconsciously Perceived Reward Cues on Human Performance

Abstract

The question of how human performance can be improved through rewards is a recurrent topic of interest in psychology. Traditional approaches to this question have usually studied the effects of consciously communicated rewards, and in that have focused mainly on conscious processes such as deliberate decision making and conscious reflection. Recently, however, following the discovery that a large part of human behavior unfolds unconsciously, researchers have proposed that conscious awareness and reflection may be entirely unnecessary or effective human reward pursuit. The present dissertation investigated this idea by systematically comparing the effects consciously perceived rewards with the effects of rewards that perceived outside of conscious awareness. A series of Experiments revealed both similarities and striking differences in the way consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards impact processes such as decision making, task preparation, or task execution. The results can be broadly summarized to yield two main conclusions. First, in relatively simple contexts, both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards can improve performance by influencing people’s decisions to invest effort in a task and by increasing people’s preparedness to perform a task well. Secondly, unconscious reward processing appears to be rather limited when it comes to improving performance strategically and efficiently in more complex contexts, such as for instance when rewards are unattainable or can be attained only through future performance, or when valuable and personally rewarding stimuli turn out not to be rewards at all. In such contexts, conscious awareness and reflection appear to elicit unique processes that play an important role in providing flexible control over behavior. These findings have interesting practical implications, as they point to new ways to improve human performance through rewards. The findings also have broader theoretical implications concerning the much-debated role of consciousness in modulating goal-directed human behavior more generally