Motivated Incidental Learning (MIL)

Description: A new paradigm - the magic trick paradigm - was developed to investigate the effects of motivation (i.e., the subjective feeling of curiosity and the availability of extrinsic incentives) on memory encoding and presented to 50 participants inside the MRI scanner. Participants viewed a series of 36 magic trick videos and performed a judgement task including curiosity ratings. The performance in the judgement task was incentivised for half of the participants. A week later, memory for the magic tricks was tested using a surprise memory test. fMRI data were analysed using the intersubject synchronicity framework. To account for the interrelatedness in the data, linear mixed effects models with crossed random effects (LME-CRE) were applied using AFNI's 3dISC. The model estimation was restricted to a grey matter (GM) mask. The effects of the incentives manipulation are coded as G11 (i.e., control group; deviation-coded as 1) vs G22 (i.e., incentive group; deviation-coded as -1) so that any positive clusters (shown in red) indicate G11>G22 whereas any negative clusters (shown in blue) indicate G11<G22.

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