Nico Böhler's research while affiliated with Ghent University and other places

... Surprisingly, even though main effects of reward (i.e., faster RT in rewarded compared to non-rewarded conditions) were present in previous studies, findings concerning the modulation of conflict effects by reward are mixed. For example, some studies have used cues in advance of trials or blocks in order to signal prospective performance-contingent reward (e.g., Bundt, Boehler, Verbruggen, Brass, & Notebaert, 2021;Frömer, Lin, Dean Wolf, Inzlicht, & Shenhav, 2021;Padmala & Pessoa, 2011;Yamaguchi & Nishimura, 2019). Because participants know in advance of target onset that they can obtain reward, it is generally assumed that participants proac-tively bias motivation-related control processes in anticipation of potential reward. ...

... Most of them were light smokers, however, as seen by low average scores (1.96 ± 2.1) on the Fagerström test for Nicotine Dependence (FTND; Heatherton et al., 1991). Because nicotine can considerably reduce pupil size (Wardhani et al., 2020), and because we sought to evaluate the tasks in conditions of relative craving, they were all asked to refrain from smoking for at least 90 min prior to the experiment (mean: 7.5 h; indeed, half of them last smoked the evening before the experiment). In addition to the FTND, smokers were asked to fill in the Severity of Dependence Scale (SDS; Gossop et al., 1992) and the Questionnaire of Smoking Urges (QSUbrief; Cox et al., 2001), to assess self-reported craving. ...

... Alterations in neural substrates of reward-placebo paradigms are the basis for the improved activation and excitability in motor-related regions, including the corticospinal pathways. Indeed, while it was observed that different reward paradigms improved the excitability of motor cortex areas such as PFC, and PMC (Galaro et al. 2019;Codol et al. 2020;Adkins and Lee 2021;Swanson et al. 2021), others observed increased excitability in corticospinal pathways (Klein et al. 2012;Bundt et al. 2019). The rewardinduced alterations in electrophysiological properties of motor-related areas may be ultimately beneficial to motor performance and perceptual responses to exercise. ...

... Based on this evidence, the authors proposed that activity in the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex may serve as a common neural currency for the coding of the valence dimension of reward and emotion processing. This idea of the common valence dimension can be further extended to hypothesize valence-compatible interactions between reward and emotion (Park et al., 2019). For instance, under reward motivation, processing of compatible (i.e., positive) emotion could be facilitated, whereas processing of incompatible (i.e., negative) emotion could be hampered (Park et al., 2019). ...

... A recent functional MRI (fMRI) study, where the authors had included both reward and emotion tasks (in separate blocks) within the same set of participants reported greater activity in a key evaluative brain region for positive compared to negatively valenced stimuli across both domains (Park et al., 2018). Based on this evidence, the authors proposed that activity in the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex may serve as a common neural currency for the coding of the valence dimension of reward and emotion processing. ...

... Additionally, sWM performance improved when the possibility for incentives was maintained by internal representations as well as cues at the start of each sWM trial. However, behavioral effects were overall stronger for cued incentives, compared to non-cued incentives, likely reflecting the salience of visual stimuli (Krebs et al., 2015), and similar for loss and gain conditions. Eye-tracking analyses in a subset of participants suggested that the improvement in incentivized sWM performance was not due to shifting strategies related to worse central fixation; in fact, under incentivized sWM conditions, participants showed relatively better central fixation, a finding echoed in prior work of humans and monkeys (Leon and Shadlen, 1999;Roesch and Olson, 2005;Kennerley and Wallis, 2009;Cho et al., 2018). ...