The influence of motivational incentives on error- and feedback-induced learning in children, adolescents, younger and older adults

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Nicola K. Ferdinand
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2012 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 215713263

Learning via errors and feedback is an important prerequisite for adjusting our behavior to different situational demands. By processing feedback from our environment and our own errors, we learn how to behave adequately and goal-directed. For these learning processes, the midbrain dopaminergic system plays a crucial role because it continuously predicts events in terms of their hedonistic value and compares the actual events with these predictions. In the previous project, we examined the basic mechanisms and age-related impairments of this learning process and found that positive expectancy violations are processed in a very similar manner as negative ones, i.e. errors and negative feedback. We also found that changes in this learning process in old age are tightly connected with impairments in working memory capacity. (A detailed description of these findings can be found in paragraph 1: State of the Art and Preliminary Work.)The present project proposal aims at broadening the above findings and examine motivational influences on error and feedback processing across the lifespan. Motivational influences on cognitive processes like attention, perception, and memory are well documented. Additionally, many empirical studies implicitly assume that especially monetary incentives affect the motivation of participants to attentively and seriously work on the task at hand because they are paid for their participation (oftentimes even dependent on their performance). Studies on error and feedback processing also oftentimes use monetary wins and losses as feedback. Thus, although it is known that motivational incentives modulate cognitive processes, the incentive itself is almost never the object of investigation because it is assumed that it does not influence the basic processing. However, this assumption has to be questioned when investigating error and feedback processing because there is a large overlap in brain structures processing incentives and those processing errors and feedback. Additionally, the subjective value of monetary (and other) incentives changes across the lifespan. For this reason, the main goal of this follow-up proposal is to compare the effect of different incentive types in children, adolescents, younger and older adults in an integrative paradigm. Possible types of incentives are monetary incentives, like wins and losses, abstract, cognitive performance feedback, primary reinforcers, like candy, and social incentives, like obtaining social acceptance.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partner: William Gehring