Adaptive reward pursuit: How effort requirements affect unconscious reward responses and conscious reward decisions.

Adaptive reward pursuit: how effort requirements affect unconscious reward responses and conscious reward decisions.

When in pursuit of rewards, humans weigh the value of potential rewards against the amount of effort that is required to attain them. Although previous research has generally conceptualized this process as a deliberate calculation, recent work suggests that rudimentary mechanisms-operating without conscious intervention-play an important role as well. In this article, we propose that humans can...

Distinct neural responses to conscious versus unconscious monetary reward cues

Human reward pursuit is often assumed to involve conscious processing of reward information. However, recent research revealed that reward cues enhance cognitive performance even when perceived without awareness. Building on this discovery, the present functional MRI study tested two hypotheses using a rewarded mental-rotation task. First, we examined whether subliminal rewards engage the ventr...

(Un)conscious Updating? Conscious and Unconscious Reward Cues Can Affect Executive Control

The present study investigates whether updating, an important function of executive control, can be driven by unconscious reward cues. Participants had to memorize several numbers and update those numbers independently according to a sequence of arithmetic operations. At the beginning of each trial, a reward (1 euro or 5 cents) was presented, either subliminally or supraliminally. Participants ...

Asymptotic Behavior of Multivariate Reward Processes with Nonlinear Reward Functions

COVARIANCE MATRIX OF MULTIVARIATE REWARD PROCESSES WITH NONLINEAR REWARD FUNCTIONS

Multivariate reward processes with reward functions of constant rates, defined on a semi-Markov process, first were studied by Masuda and Sumita, 1991. Reward processes with nonlinear reward functions were introduced in Soltani, 1996. In this work we study a multivariate process , , where are reward processes with nonlinear reward functions respectively. The Laplace transform of the covar...