Effect of Monetary Reward on Manual Automatic Imitation

Abstract

Automatic imitation is an ongoing topic of research across various domains including neuroscience, social psychology, and cognitive psychology. It is unclear how automatic the process really is, but previous studies suggested that motivation as measured with reward manipulation could discern between intentional and automatic imitation. The present study investigated the influence of reward manipulations on the automatic imitation effect. Specifically, we conducted an online study with a between-subjects design (N = 83) comparing the performance between participants with monetary incentives (reward group) and participants with no monetary incentives (no-reward group) through a stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) key-pressing task. We found an automatic imitation effect, demonstrated by faster response times for congruent trials than incongruent trials, but no effect of the reward manipulation is observed in this study. We concluded that automatic imitation was not modulated by reward suggesting that the imitation process was automatic.