Abstract
Research showing that monetary reward promotes memory consolidation through dopaminergic modulation processes has recently attracted considerable attention in psychology and neuroscience. However, no conclusive behavioral evidence exists given that the influence of monetary reward on attention and motivation during encoding and consolidation processes are inherently confounded. The present study provides the first unequivocal behavioral evidence that monetary incentives enhance human memory consolidation. Participants saw neutral pictures, followed by a monetary or control cue in an unrelated context. Our results demonstrated that the monetary cue predicted a retrograde enhancement of memory for the preceding neutral pictures. This retrograde effect was observed only after a delay, not immediately upon testing. We also observed that interindividual and intraindividual variability in memory performance is consistent with predictions derived from theories addressing dopaminergic activation in the reward system. These results provide strong support for the dopaminergic memory consolidation effect resulting from monetary reward.
