Rewards interact with explicit knowledge to enhance skilled motor performance
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/745851v1
Excited to share the lab’s 2nd official preprint and our 1st with a pre-registered experiment! Props to 1st author (and CoCoA lab RA) Sean Anderson! There is a lot of evidence that rewards causes people to ‘do better’. Rewards increase vigor (force/speed) of simple movements.
We were curious if the reward-based improvements seen in more complex motor skills were all just due to this increase in motivational vigor, or if other processes in the hierarchy of action (planning and/or action selection) were similarly improved.
Participants trained on motor sequencing skills, some with color cues to promote explicit knowledge and allow for movement pre-planning. Although rewards improved performance on all skills, those that could be pre-planned showed a much larger boost in performance.
The size of this boost was related to the amount of explicit knowledge gained, but only if pre-planning was possible. It seems that movement pre-planning is enhanced by reward and that explicit skill knowledge benefits are due to planning despite what is sometimes claimed.