Reward has been shown to change behavior as a result of incentive learning (by motivating the individual to increase their effort) and instrumental learning (by increasing the frequency of a particular behavior). However, Palminteri et al. (2011) demonstrated that reward can also improve the incidental learning of a motor skill even when…

Early research on visual imagery led investigators to suggest that mental visual images are just weak versions of visual percepts. Later research helped investigators understand that mental visual images differ in deeper and more subtle ways from visual percepts. Research on motor imagery has yet to reach this mature state, however. Many authors…

Sleep is known to promote the consolidation of motor memories. In everyday life, typically more than 1 isolated motor skill is acquired at a time, and this possibly gives rise to interference during consolidation. Here, it is shown that reward expectancy determines the amount of sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Subjects were trained on 2…