EARLI SIG 22: Neuroscience and Education Conference 2026 - Dynamical aspects of the effect of curiosity, reward incentives and their interaction on memory
Date:
This poster won the Best Poster Award
Abstract:
Curiosity and reward incentives, representing intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, have both been found to be effective motivators of memory formation and recall. However, previous findings on a potential interaction effect between the two have not agreed.
For instance, Duan et al. (2020) and Meliss et al. (2024) found that curiosity and reward both independently and positively predict memory performance. However, other studies like Murayama & Kuhbandner (2011) and Swirsky et al. (2021) find that curiosity and reward interact: rewards only help recall for uninteresting questions. We used an adapted version of the trivia paradigm to understand the effects of curiosity and reward incentives on recall performance. We asked participants to rate their curiosity for a large set of trivia questions and later gave them the answer. Additionally, we gave participants reward incentives tied to their recall performance in either the first or second half of the experiment. On the same day (immediate test) and a week later (delayed test), we asked them to recall the answers to these question to see how much they remembered.
We found that curiosity was a strong predictor of recall in both tests. Surprisingly, we found that rewards do not predict recall in either test or interact with curiosity. Exploratory analyses, however, showed a strong interaction effect between curiosity and reward-order: when participants started with the non-rewarded block, curiosity was a clear predictor of recall. But, if participants started in the rewarded block, the effect of curiosity on recall became statistically zero. These results demonstrate that the effects of curiosity and reward on memory are strongly shaped by reward structure. For education, these results show how curiosity’s positive effect can be unwillingly attenuated when rewards are improperly administered. Educators should be mindful of using reward incentives and not apply them as all-round effective motivator.
References:
Duan, H., Fernández, G., Van Dongen, E., & Kohn, N. (2020). The effect of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on memory formation: Insight from behavioral and imaging study. Brain Structure and Function, 225, 1561–1574. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02074-x
Meliss, S., Tsuchiyagaito, A., Byrne, P., van Reekum, C., & Murayama, K. (2024). Broad brain networks support curiosity-motivated incidental learning of naturalistic dynamic stimuli with and without monetary incentives. Imaging Neuroscience, 2, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00134
Murayama, K., & Kuhbandner, C. (2011). Money enhances memory consolidation—But only for boring material. Cognition, 119(1), 120–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.01.001
Swirsky, L. T., Shulman, A., & Spaniol, J. (2021). The Interaction of Curiosity and Reward on Long-Term Memory in Younger and Older Adults. Psychology and Aging. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000623