Punishment Enhances Performance: Study

A latest study from researchers at the University of Nottingham states that punishment acts as a better tool in enhancing performance and is equal to monetary reward.

"This work reveals important new information about how the brain functions that could lead to new methods of diagnosing neural development disorders such as autism, ADHD and personality disorders, where decision-making processes have been shown to be compromised," lead author of the study Dr. Marios Philiastides said in a press statement.

Through this study, the researchers wanted to check how the efficiency of decision-making, based on the ambiguous sensory information that includes both visual and auditory, is affected by anticipated punishment.

Researchers asked the participants to perform a simple perceptual task. They presented a blurred image behind a rainy window and asked the participants to judge whether the blurred shape was a person or something else.

Those who made the wrong decision were punished by imposing monetary penalties. Researchers also measured the brain activity of the participants at the time of decision-making using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine.

The researchers noticed that as the amount of punishment increased, the participants' performance increased systematically, clearly indicating that punishment acts as a performance enhancer.

They also noticed that punishment induced multiple and distinct brain activations throughout different areas of the brain.  On analyzing the timing, they realized that the act of punishment does not influence the manner in which the brain processes sensory data. Rather, it has an impact on the brain's decision maker that is responsible for decoding sensory information at a later stage in the decision-making process.

Those participants who had the greatest improvements in performance also showed a great change in brain activity.

The details of the finding were published in the Journal of Neuroscience.