A Cross-cultural Comparison of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivational Drives for Learning

Intrinsic motivational drives, like the autonomous feeling of control, and extrinsic motivational drives, like monetary reward, can benefit learning. Extensive research has focused on biological and psychological factors that affect these drives, but our understanding of the equally important cultural factors is limited. Here, we compared the effects of autonomy and rewards on recognition memory between students from Dutch and Chinese universities. In an exploratory learning task, participants viewed partially obscured images that they needed to subsequently remember. We independently manipulated autonomy, as volitional control over an exploration trajectory, as well as the chance to receive monetary rewards. The learning task was followed by a memory test. For both countries, we found that students learned better in autonomous than non-autonomous conditions. However, we found that the effect of reward on memory performance was stronger for Chinese than for Dutch students. In this collection, you will find the raw data collected in both locations (Beijing, China and Nijmegen, the Netherlands), and the code to preprocess the data and statistical analysis. Data structure and detailed information of the dataset are enclosed in readme.