Funded Grants

Understanding motivation and cognition: Combining psychology and neuropharmacology

Willpower: scholars from a variety of discipline have been fascinated by this concept for centuries. In philosophy, it refers to a capacity to voluntarily and intentionally act according to one’s desires. In psychology, it is a concept intimately linked with phenomena such as cognitive control and motivation.

Cognitive control is an ill‐defined term, but generally refers to the ability to direct our behavior at our goals. A longstanding question concerns the driving force behind such goal‐directed behavior. What are the mechanisms by which we motivate ourselves to obtain our goals? What motivates us to exert cognitive control? Why are some people driven by the least bit of stimulation, while others have difficulty getting off the couch for almost anything?

The goals that guide our behavior can be defined at different levels and are organized hierarchically: motivational goals (e.g., ‘maximize reward’ or ‘minimize punishment’) and cognitive goals (e.g. ‘complete taskset x’). Ultimately, adequate cognitive control requires, among other things, the transformation of information about motivational goals into abstract cognitive goals.

Both motivation and cognitive control have received extensive attention. Accumulating evidence indicates that they both implicate brain circuitry connecting the prefrontal cortex and the striatum. These brain regions are highly sensitive to modulation by the ascending neuromodulator dopamine. However, surprisingly little is known, at either psychological or neural level, about the interaction between motivation and cognitive control: Does being motivated imply that we have more cognitive control over our behavior? Does motivation make it easier to direct our behavior at our current goals? Is drive and motivation always a good thing, or can motivation also have detrimental consequences for cognitive control and goal‐directed behavior? Ongoing and future work in my group focuses on this interaction between, on the one hand, motivational control, and on the other hand, cognitive control.

In folk psychological terms, being motivated implies being goal‐driven. Accordingly, one might intuit that motivation just has beneficial consequences for our ability to direct our behavior at our cognitive goals. In line with this intuition, appetitive motivation – the state triggered by external stimuli that have rewarding properties ‐ has been argued to have general, nonspecific enhancing effects on cognition. However, recent evidence indicates that motivation does not enhance all cognitive processes in a nonspecific manner and can in fact impair some cognitive processes. For example we have argued that appetitive motivation, which is known to implicate changes in dopaminergic activity, has functionally selective consequences for cognitive control. This suggestion stems from our own and others’ previous insights that (i) changes in appetitive motivation are accompanied by changes in dopamine, and (ii) dopamine has contrasting effects on cognitive control depending on current task demands and associated neural systems. Ongoing and future experiments on motivation in my group leverage knowledge about the relationships between dopamine and cognitive control, as well as that between dopamine and motivation, and are grounded in the working hypothesis that changes in motivation also have contrasting effects on cognitive control depending on current task demands and associated neural systems. One important implication of this would be that being motivated does not necessarily contribute to greater cognitive control.