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Cognitive Psychology

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Decision-making

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Full-Text Articles in Psychology

Individual Differences In Discounting Delayed Gains, Delayed Losses, And Probabilistic Losses, Yu-Hua Yeh May 2018

Individual Differences In Discounting Delayed Gains, Delayed Losses, And Probabilistic Losses, Yu-Hua Yeh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many decisions in one’s daily life involve the discounting of delayed or probabilistic losses: Should we pay off our credit-card balance in full or incur interest; should we buy more collision and liability insurance or risk having to pay more in case of an accident? Despite its importance, however, discounting of losses is understudied, and few studies have focused on individual differences. The current study recruited 407 on-line participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk who completed three discounting questionnaires: delayed losses, probabilistic losses, and delayed gains. Magnitude effects were observed with delayed gains (i.e., larger delayed gains were discounted less steeply …


Humans Integrate Monetary And Liquid Incentives To Motivate Cognitive Task Performance, Debbie Yee Dec 2015

Humans Integrate Monetary And Liquid Incentives To Motivate Cognitive Task Performance, Debbie Yee

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is unequivocal that a wide variety of incentives can motivate behavior. However, few studies have explicitly examined whether and how different incentives are integrated in terms of their motivational influence. The current study examines the combined effects of monetary and liquid incentives on cognitive processing, and whether appetitive and aversive incentives have distinct influences. We introduce a novel task paradigm, in which participants perform cued task-switching for monetary rewards that vary parametrically across trials, with liquid incentives serving as post-trial performance feedback. Critically, the symbolic meaning of the liquid was held constant (indicating successful reward attainment), while liquid valence …