Behavioral Sensitivity to Reward Is Reduced for Far Objects

Many studies have demonstrated that people will adjust their behavioral response to a reward on the basis of the time taken to receive the reward. Yet despite growing evidence that time and space are not mentally independent, there has been no examination of whether spatial distance may also affect...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychological science 2014-01, Vol.25 (1), p.271-277
Main Authors: O'Connor, David A., Meade, Bernard, Carter, Olivia, Rossiter, Sarah, Hester, Robert
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Behavior
Behavioural sciences
Biological and medical sciences
Blue stellar objects
Cognition
Cubes
Decision making
Decision Making - physiology
Discounting
Distance perception
Distance Perception - physiology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Legal objections
Literary tropes
Male
Mental objects
Motivation
Perception
Personality. Affectivity
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Research Report
Responses
Reward
Rewards
Sensitivity
Time
Values
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Many studies have demonstrated that people will adjust their behavioral response to a reward on the basis of the time taken to receive the reward. Yet despite growing evidence that time and space are not mentally independent, there has been no examination of whether spatial distance may also affect the way people respond to rewarding objects. We examined speeded binary decisions about objects associated with high, low, or no reward for correct responses. Using a 3-D display, we varied perceived spatial distance so that objects appeared at distances near to or far from participants. Both the speed and the accuracy of responses were better for high-reward objects compared with lowand no-reward objects, but this difference occurred only when the objects appeared at near distance to participants. These results demonstrate that when people respond to rewarding objects, they show sensitivity to spatial-distance information even if the information is irrelevant to the task.
ISSN:0956-7976
1467-9280
DOI:10.1177/0956797613503663