CAREER: The vital role of motivation in cognition

In order to achieve long-term goals, people need to exert cognitive control, a set of mental capacities that allows them to focus their thoughts and direct their actions. However, people often fail to engage sufficient and well-directed cognitive control, leading to poorer outcomes at school and in the workplace. This research investigates the neural and computational mechanisms responsible for making these decisions and studies how people weigh the costs and benefits of exerting mental effort on a given task.

Different hypotheses are tested about how these decisions are altered when someone is in a stressful environment, which is known to impair cognitive control. This work will achieve better understanding of the sources of variability in achievement of educational, career, and health goals, and why these achievement outcomes may differ for individuals who regularly encounter stressful environments.

This project includes community outreach designed to help to educate students about the role that environment plays in shaping motivation, and about the importance of motivation for achieving their goals.

While the mechanisms underlying the exertion of mental effort are well known, much less is known about how people perform the cost-benefit analysis that determines whether and how they will invest their mental effort. The investigators’ model of the neural and computational mechanisms underlying the evaluation of mental effort divides this evaluation into computationally explicit components, including (1) how people weigh the potential outcomes of their effort, (2) how people weigh the extent to which their efforts are efficacious for achieving those outcomes, and (3) how people consider the different ways in which they can direct their efforts.

By combining this model with a novel set of tasks that target each of its components, as well as brain imaging measures of neural activity and connectivity, this research maps out the neural architecture underlying the evaluation of mental effort. This research also tests how components of this evaluation process are altered by mild experimentally-induced stress in the laboratory, providing a clearer understanding of how environmental stressors may alter one’s perceptions of the value of their efforts, potentially contributing to poorer performance on cognitive tasks.

Knowledge gained through this work contributes to resolving the key role of corticostriatal interactions (between the cortex and subcortical striatum) including reward-related and control-related circuits in motivation and cognition. This study also provides new computational and experimental tools for probing the sources of variability in effort allocation across individuals and contexts, helps understand the causes of inequalities in academic and career achievement for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and provides strategies for overcoming motivational challenges in order to use one’s available cognitive resources to best advantage and hence better meet one’s goals.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.