CAREER: The vital role of motivation in cognition

为了实现长期目标，人们需要施加认知控制，这是一套允许他们集中思想和指导行动的心理能力。然而，人们往往不能进行充分和正确的认知控制，导致在学校和工作场所取得更差的结果。这项研究调查了负责做出这些决定的神经和计算机制，并研究了人们如何权衡在给定任务上付出精神努力的成本和收益。测试了不同的假设，即当一个人处于紧张的环境中时，这些决定是如何改变的，这是众所周知的，这会损害认知控制。这项工作将有助于更好地理解在实现教育、职业和健康目标方面的变异性来源，以及为什么经常遇到压力环境的个人的这些成就结果可能不同。该项目包括社区推广活动，旨在帮助教育学生了解环境在形成动机方面的作用，以及动机对实现他们的目标的重要性。虽然人们都知道脑力消耗的机制，但人们如何进行成本效益分析却知之甚少。成本效益分析决定了人们是否以及如何投资他们的脑力。研究人员对心理努力评估背后的神经和计算机制的模型将评估分为计算明确的部分，包括(1)人们如何权衡他们努力的潜在结果，(2)人们如何权衡他们的努力在多大程度上有效地实现了这些结果，以及(3)人们如何考虑他们可以指导他们的努力的不同方式。通过将这一模型与一组针对其每个组成部分的新颖任务以及神经活动和连接性的大脑成像测量相结合，这项研究绘制出了评估精神努力的神经架构。这项研究还测试了这一评估过程的组成部分如何在实验室中被轻微的实验诱导的压力所改变，从而更清楚地了解环境应激源可能如何改变一个人对其努力的价值的看法，从而潜在地导致认知任务中表现较差。通过这项工作获得的知识有助于解决皮质纹状体相互作用(皮质和皮质下纹状体之间)的关键作用，包括与奖励和控制相关的回路在动机和认知中的作用。这项研究还提供了新的计算和实验工具，用于探索个人和环境中努力分配的变异性来源，帮助理解弱势背景的人在学业和职业成就方面不平等的原因，并提供克服动机挑战的策略，以便最大限度地利用一个人可用的认知资源，从而更好地实现一个人的目标。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.