Rewards and feedback: How task context impacts performance on measures of executive functions

Most traditional measures of executive function (EF) have minimal emotional salience, limiting their ecological validity in real-world contexts where emotional and motivational factors are pervasive. Through contextual manipulation, however, the administration of EF tasks can be adjusted to increase emotional salience without altering the core cognitive demands of the tasks. This non-randomised between-groups experimental study examined whether two forms of contextual manipulation, post-trial feedback and performance-based monetary rewards, influenced EF task performance. A total of 98 participants aged 20-59 years ( M = 31.14; SD = 10.54) were assigned to one of four experimental conditions: standard administration, feedback, monetary reward, or combined feedback and monetary reward. Participants completed four EF tasks assessing updating (Keep Track), shifting (Colour-Shape Task), planning (Tower of Hanoi), and affective decision-making (Iowa Gambling Task). Results indicated that contextual manipulation selectively influenced EF performance. Specifically, interactions were observed for updating and planning. Post-trial feedback improved Keep Track performance only under fixed reward instructions, and a similar pattern was observed for Tower of Hanoi performance, where feedback improved planning only when rewards were not described as performance-based. In contrast, performance on the Colour-Shape Task and Iowa Gambling Task was not significantly influenced by post-trial feedback, reward instructions, or their interaction. These findings suggest that increasing emotional or motivational salience may influence some EF task outcomes, but these effects are not uniform across EF domains.