Image courtesy of Pixabay
Imagine you’re playing the piano, struggling with a tricky section. Your mind starts to drift—until the smell of freshly baked cookies wafts in from the kitchen. Though it has nothing to do with your piano playing, the smell somehow pulls your focus back just in time to perfectly hit the next note. This simple moment captures the core idea of recent research led by Juliana Trach, a PhD student in the lab of Samuel D. McDougle, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University. Their work shows that even unexpected rewards, or rewards that aren’t directly tied to performance on a task, still have a brief positive effect on attention. This phenomenon provides insight into how motivation and focus are connected in surprising ways.
The researchers designed a hybrid task that tested both sustained attention and reinforcement learning. Sustained attention, the ability to maintain focus over time, was tested by asking participants to respond quickly to colored shapes. Onene shape appeared ninety percent of the time and another that appeared only ten percent of the time. At the same time, they completed a reinforcement learning task, where they chose between two shapes with different reward probabilities, learning through trial and error which option was more likely to yield a reward. The rewards, whether actively earned based on their choices or randomly awarded, were given regardless of how well participants performed in the attention task. However, the results showed that receiving a reward still influenced their ability to stay focused, suggesting that even unexpected rewards can momentarily boost attention.
“We were fascinated by the idea that rewards could enhance attention, even when they weren’t acting as a direct incentive,” McDougle said. “If rewards can influence focus without being tied to performance, that suggests there’s a more fundamental mechanism at play, one that isn’t just about motivation or effort.”
Right after receiving a reward, participants experienced a brief but noticeable boost in attention and performance. Interestingly, while the researchers initially considered that surprise might play a role, they found that it wasn’t the unexpectedness of a reward that mattered but simply its presence. “It may just be that the reward effect ‘swamps’ any surprise effect,” McDougle said.
The study also revealed a deeper connection between learning and attention. Participants who performed well in the reinforcement learning task—meaning they quickly adapted to shifting reward probabilities—also showed better sustained attention overall. This suggests that the processes underlying learning and vigilance might be more intertwined than previously thought. The ability to stay engaged may depend on how well someone identifies and responds to important cues in a given moment.
The idea that brief, incidental rewards can provide a temporary boost to attention opens up new possibilities for designing environments that support sustained engagement and productivity, whether in the classroom or in the workplace.
More than anything, this research challenges traditional views on how rewards shape focus. Instead of acting purely as incentives, rewards might also act as triggers that momentarily snap us back to attention—cutting through distractions, like the smell of fresh cookies pulling you back into the moment.