A Neural and Computational Framework of the Effort Paradox

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Exerting effort is essential for a successful life. From training for a marathon, to completing a project before work deadlines, meeting our goals requires us to repeatedly choose to undertake effortful acts. Pathological reductions in such goal-directed motivation characterise some of the most common and debilitating symptoms in psychiatry and neurology. Moreover, solving humanities greatest challenges (e.g. climate change) will require billions of people to exert more effort than they typically do. Yet, we have a limited understanding of the biggest challenge to research on motivation: the effort paradox. On one hand, decades of research shows that people conform to a law of least effort, avoiding the cost of effort. On the other hand, at school, work or in our hobbies, people break that law daily, we pursue and seek highly effortful acts when easier options are available. How does the brain concurrently process effort as a cost to avoid, but a benefit to seek? EffDox will deliver a paradigm shift in our understanding of the cognitive, computational and neural basis of motivation to address this paradox. It will provide novel paradigms and computational models to understand the cognitive processes and individual differences that underlie how people switch from avoiding effort to seeking it. A suite of neuroscience tools, never previously combined to examine motivation, will offer a new understanding and test specific hypotheses about the neural dynamics underlying effort. This will include multivariate techniques to 'fuse' together functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) in healthy people; simultaneous deep brain stimulation, cortical intracranial and subcortical recordings, in unique samples of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, and testing links between dopamine, motivation and neural signals with wearable MEG. These conceptual, methodological and analytical innovations will reveal a new understanding of the effort paradox.