Mothers exhibit higher neural activity in gaining rewards for their children than for themselves.

Are people willing to exert greater effort to obtain rewards for their children than they are for themselves? Although previous studies have demonstrated that social distance influences neural responses to altruistic reward processing, the distinction between winning rewards for oneself and winning them for one's child is unclear. In the present study, a group of 31 mothers performed a monetary incentive delay task in which cue-induced reward anticipations of winning a reward for themselves, their children and donation to a charity program were manipulated trial-wise, followed by performance-contingent feedback. Behaviorally, the anticipation of winning a reward for their children accelerated participants' responses. Importantly, the electroencephalogram results revealed that across the reward anticipation and consumption phases, the child condition elicited comparable or higher brain responses of participants than the self condition did. The source localization results showed that participants' reward anticipations for their children were associated with more activation in the social brain regions, compared to winning a reward for themselves or a charity donation. Overall, these findings advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms of altruistic reward processing and suggest that the priority of winning a reward for one's child may transcend the limits of the self-advantage effect in reward processing.

Comparing monetary gain and loss in the monetary incentive delay task: EEG evidence.

What is more effective to guide behavior: The desire to gain or the fear to lose? Electroencephalography (EEG) studies have yielded inconsistent answers. In a systematic exploration of the valence and magnitude parameters in monetary gain and loss processing, we used time-domain and time-frequency-domain analyses to uncover the underlying neural processes. A group of 24 participants performed a monetary incentive delay (MID) task in which cue-induced anticipation of a high or low magnitude of gain or loss was manipulated trial-wise. Behaviorally, the anticipation of both gain and loss expedited responses, with gain anticipation producing greater facilitation than loss anticipation. Analyses of cue-locked P2 and P3 components revealed the significant valence main effect and valence × magnitude interaction: amplitude differences between high and low incentive magnitudes were larger with gain vs. loss cues. However, the contingent negative variation component was sensitive to incentive magnitude but did not vary with incentive valence. In the feedback phase, the RewP component exhibited reversed patterns for gain and loss trials. Time-frequency analyses revealed a large increase in delta/theta-ERS oscillatory activity in high- vs. low-magnitude conditions and a large decrease of alpha-ERD oscillatory activity in gain vs. loss conditions in the anticipation stage. In the consumption stage, delta/theta-ERS turned out stronger for negative than positive feedback, especially in the gain condition. Overall, our study provides new evidence for the neural oscillatory features of monetary gain and loss processing in the MID task, suggesting that participants invested more attention under gain and high-magnitude conditions vs. loss and low-magnitude conditions.

Reward expectation enhances reactive control of distraction by emotionally negative stimuli.

Reward expectation reduces the interference of task-irrelevant emotional distractors by improving cognitive control. The current study investigated the effects of reward expectation on proactive and reactive cognitive control of negative distractors. Reward expectation (incentive vs. nonincentive trials) was manipulated by a precue signaling the opportunity to gain an extra monetary reward for fast and accurate response on a given trial, followed by the trial display with the response-relevant target stimuli in the periphery and an irrelevant, negative, or neutral distractor in the center. The frequency of negative distractors (high vs. low) was manipulated to induce a proactive or reactive control mode (between-participants factor). Mutilation images and angry faces were used as negative distractors in Experiments 1 (1A and 1B) and 2, respectively. Results revealed performance to be generally facilitated by reward expectation, and impaired by negative (vs. neutral) distractors. Importantly, reward expectation rendered a reduction of negative-distractor interference when observers operated in reactive (vs. proactive) control mode. Moreover, the interaction between reward expectation and cognitive control strategy was modulated by the emotional strength of the negative distractors (mutilation images vs. angry faces). Thus, reward incentive leads to more effective filtering of negative (emotional) distractors when these occur rarely (reactive control) rather than frequently (proactive control), especially with emotionally strong negative distractors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Expectations of immediate and delayed reward differentially affect cognitive task performance.

The current study used a modified Monetary Incentive Delay task to examine the neural mechanisms underlying anticipating and receiving an immediate or delayed reward and examined the influence of pursuing these rewards on cognitive task performance. A pre-cue indicating the potential of gaining a monetary reward (immediate-, delayed-, vs. no-reward) was followed by a target stimulus requiring a fast and accurate response. Then, response-contingent feedback was presented indicating whether or not the participant would receive the corresponding reward. Linear mixed-effect models revealed the fastest behavioural responses and the strongest neural activity, as reflected in event-related-potentials and event-related-spectral-perturbation responses, for immediate reward, followed by delayed reward, with the slowest behavioural responses and the weakest neural activities observed in the no-reward condition. Expectations related to the cue-P3 component and the cue-delta activities predicted behavioural performance, especially in the immediate reward condition. Moreover, exploratory analyses revealed that depression moderated the relationship between target-locked neural activity and behavioural performance in the delayed reward condition, with lower neural activity being related to worse behavioural performance amongst participants scoring high on depression. These results indicate that differential value representations formed through delay discounting directly affect neural responses in reward processing and directly influence the effort invested in the current task, which is reflected by behavioural responses and is in agreement with the expected value of control theory.