The influence of motivation on attention and conscious visual perception : An examination with lateralized EEG power spectra.

The goal of this study was to examine the influence of motivation on attention and conscious visual perception. Motivation was manipulated by the possibility of a monetary reward that depended on performance. To examine attention and conscious visual perception a combination of a Posner cueing paradigm with backward masking was used. In total 23 participants participated. Electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements were used to examine attention by α-activity. Lateralized power spectra (LPS) were used to analyse the EEG measurements by comparing α-activity for the ipsilateral and contralateral hemispheres. It was expected that participants in the motivation group would perform better than participants in the control group due to a better allocation of attention. Analysis of the data showed that extrinsic motivation did not have a positive influence on conscious visual perception. Analysis of the EEG measurements showed that participants actively directed their attention, but extrinsic motivation did not have an influence on endogenous attention. A recommendation for future research could be to increase self-efficacy of participants by enabling more participants to win money.