Can cognitive discovery be incentivized with money?
The ability to discover patterns or rules from our experiences is critical to science, engineering, and art. In this project we examine the degree to which discovery of patterns can be incentivized by financial rewards. In particular, we investigate a classic category learning task for which the effect of financial incentives is unknown (Shepard et al., 1961). Across five experiments, we find no effect of incentive on rule discovery performance. However, in a sixth experiment requiring category recognition but not learning, we find a large effect of incentives on response time and small effect on task performance. Humans appear to apply more effort in valuable contexts, but the effort is disproportionate with the performance improvement. Taken together, the results suggest that performance in tasks which require novel inductive insights are relatively immune to financial incentive, while tasks that require rote perseverance of a fixed strategy are more malleable.
Statistical analysis code and anonymized data for manuscript results section can be found in the analysis/ directory.
Code for running the behavioral experiments is located in a separate repository here.