PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Sean P. Anderson
AU  - Tyler J. Adkins
AU  - Bradley S. Gary
AU  - Taraz G. Lee
TI  - Rewards interact with explicit knowledge to enhance skilled motor performance
AID  - 10.1101/745851
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 745851
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/24/745851.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/24/745851.full
AB  - From typing on a keyboard to playing the piano, many everyday skills require the ability to quickly and accurately perform sequential movements. It is well-known that the availability of rewards lead to increases in motivational vigor whereby people enhance both the speed and force of their movements. However, in the context of motor skills, it is unclear whether rewards also lead to more effective motor planning and action selection. Here, we trained human participants to perform four separate sequences in a skilled motor sequencing task. Two of these sequences were trained explicitly and performed with pre-cues that allow for the preplanning of movements, while the other two were trained implicitly. Immediately following the introduction of performance-contingent monetary incentives, participants improved their performance on all sequences consistent with enhancements in motivational vigor. However, there was a much larger performance boost for explicitly trained sequences. Furthermore, only on explicit sequences was the size of this incentive-based enhancement correlated with the amount of skill knowledge gained. We replicated these results in a second, pre-registered experiment with an independent sample. We conclude from these experiments that rewards enhance both the pre-planning of movements as well as motivational vigor.