Vikram Chib

And what we find is that people do, you know, as the incentives increase, you know, $25, $50, people get better.

And when you give them $100, they tend to choke under pressure.

Their performance goes down.

And we looked in the brain when that happened.

And what we found was that there's this area deep in your brain that's responsible for reward processing called the ventral striatum.

The ventral striatum, yeah.

And so it activates when the rewards are high and it actually tends to deactivate when you have potential losses.

And what we found was that what would happen is when people were playing a task and really high incentives were on the line, they would begin, they would see that incentive.

They'd be like, oh wow, I have $100 to win.

They would see that really high incentive and they would view it as a loss.

They would get worried about actually losing the really high incentive.

And that worry about loss

was related to how they choked under pressure.

So the people that tended to worry more about that loss tended to choke under pressure more.

They essentially reframed this positive thing, the $100, as, oh my gosh, I could lose that $100, right?

So it's in their mind, right?

Now, what's interesting is the ventral striatum not only does reward processing, but it also does motor processes as well.

So it initiates motor action.

And so what we think is that there was some crosstalk between those reward signals or those worry of loss signals and the motor signals.

And that's what got people to do poorly when the stakes were high.