A common assumption is that in order to get individuals to perform better on a particular task, they should be rewarded in proportion to how well they perform. This reasoning is behind performance-based pay in the workplace. However, psychologists and economists have long recognized that this type of relationship between rewards and performance only holds up to a point: When rewards get too large, often performance for a skilled task decreases rather than increases, compared to performance levels for a more moderate reward. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. John O'Doherty and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology are investigating why when a reward becomes especially large, individuals become very focused on the possibility of losing or failing to attain that reward. The researchers are studying whether the possibility of failure causes interference in the parts of the brain involved in performing a skilled act. The investigators are using functional magnetic brain imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity while volunteers perform a skilled task that involves a sequence of careful hand movements for which they receive differing amounts of potential monetary rewards, ranging from small to relatively large. The researchers are investigating whether performance levels for the larger rewards decreases relative to that for medium incentive levels, and whether decreasing brain activity in an area called the "ventral striatum" is related to individual performance decrements. In this project, the investigators are using multiple methods to manipulate how much individuals are focused on obtaining a negative and/or losing outcome while they perform the task. The researchers assert that a) the more individuals are focused on losing, the greater their performance declines; whereas, conversely, the less individuals are oriented to the possibility of losing, the greater their performance increase and that b) differences in focus are related to differing patterns of activity in the brain.
Understanding why it is that performance sometimes decreases when the rewards (or stakes) are large has important implications in a number of areas. The knowledge gained could be used to design better schemes for incentivizing people to perform well on a work task, by minimizing the potential for performance deteriorations. More generally, many human endeavors demand high levels of performance under conditions of high stakes (high potential gain and high potential losses). Competitive sports are an obvious example, but similar scenarios likely arise in other high-pressure contexts, such as during surgery or the piloting of aircraft. A better understanding of how and why performance decrements occur could aid the development of new strategies to minimize their impact. Dr. O'Doherty participates in the public dissemination of research findings through a variety of media, including news papers and magazines, science blogs, and radio. The present project also contributes to the scientific training of undergraduate and graduate students, and the results of the research will be incorporated into courses taught at the undergraduate and graduate level.
