Rewards exert a deep influence on our cognition and behaviour. Here, we used a paradigm in which reward information was provided at either encoding or retrieval of a brief, masked stimulus to show that reward can also rapidly modulate early neural processing of visual information, prior to consciousness. Experiment 1 showed enhanced response accuracy when a to-be-encoded grating signalled high reward relative to low reward, but only when the grating was presented very briefly and participants were not consciously aware of it. Experiment 2 showed no difference in response accuracy when reward information was instead provided at the stage of retrieval, ruling out an explanation of the reward-modulation effect in terms of differences in motivated retrieval. Taken together, our findings provide the first behavioural evidence for a rapid reward-modulation of visual perception, which does not seem to require consciousness.
Evolution of neural processing for visual perception in vertebrates