The Impact of Performance Incentives during Training on Transfer of Learning

We examined the effect of incentives on transfer of training in a visual search task. The incentives were designed to influence participants' detection of dangerous targets across two phases of airline luggage screening – training (familiar targets) and transfer (novel targets). Participants were assigned to one of five groups - hit-sensitive (points awarded for hits), miss-sensitive (points deducted for misses), equal-costs (equal points awarded and deducted for hits and misses), no-incentives (no points) and control (self-training). The goal was to examine which incentive structure was most effective in transfer of training. Results revealed that rewarding points for hits and deducting points for misses led to best transfer performance, although punishment had a stronger impact on performance than rewards. Rewarding hits implicitly primed participants to say ‘yes’ more often inflating their false alarm rate. Allowing participants to self-train also significantly benefited performance by minimizing the constraints imposed by fixed incentives-based training.