The necessity to choose causes reward-related anticipatory biasing: Parieto-occipital alpha-band oscillations reveal suppression of low-value targets

Positive outcome of actions can be maximized by choosing the option with the highest reward. For saccades, it has recently been suggested that the necessity to choose is, in fact, an important factor mediating reward effects: latencies to single low-reward targets increased with an increasing proportion of interleaved choice-trials, in which participants were free to choose between two targets to obtain either a high or low reward. Here, we replicate this finding for manual responses, demonstrating that this effect of choice is a more general, effector-independent phenomenon. Oscillatory activity in the alpha and beta band in the preparatory period preceding target onset was analysed for a parieto-occipital and a centrolateral region of interest to identify an anticipatory neural biasing mechanism related to visuospatial attention or motor preparation. When the proportion of interleaved choices was high, an increase in lateralized posterior alpha power indicated that the hemifield associated with a low reward was suppressed in preparation for reward-maximizing target selection. The larger the individual increase in lateralized alpha power, the slower the reaction times to low-reward targets. At a broader level, these findings support the notion that reward only affects responses when behaviour can be optimized to maximize positive outcome.