Reward-driven distraction: A meta-analysis.

Psychological Bulletin
Dorottya RuszErik Bijleveld

Abstract

People have a strong tendency to attend to reward cues, even if these cues are irrelevant to their current goal or their current task. When reward cues are goal-irrelevant, their presence may impair cognitive performance. In this meta-analysis, we quantitatively examined the rapidly growing literature on the impact of reward-related distractors on cognitive performance. We included 91 studies (N = 2,362) that used different cognitive paradigms (e.g., visual search, conflict processing) and reward-related stimuli (e.g., money, attractive food). Overall, results showed that reward-related distractors impaired cognitive performance across different tasks and stimuli, with a small effect size (standardized mean change = .347). Between-study heterogeneity was large, suggesting that researchers can plausibly expect to sometimes find reversed effects (i.e., reward-related distractors boosting performance). We further showed that the average reward-driven distraction effect was robust across different reward-learning mechanisms, contexts, and methodological choices, and that this effect existed regardless of explicit task instructions to ignore distractors. In sum, the findings of this meta-analysis support the notion that cognitive pr...Continue Reading

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