CAREER: The vital role of motivation in cognition

为了实现长期目标，人们需要发挥认知控制力，这是一套心理能力，使他们能够集中思想并指导行动。然而，人们往往无法进行充分和良好的认知控制，导致在学校和工作场所的结果较差。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。不同的假设是测试这些决定是如何改变时，一个人是在一个紧张的环境，这是众所周知的损害认知控制。这项工作将实现更好地了解在教育，职业和健康目标的实现的可变性的来源，以及为什么这些成就的结果可能会有所不同的个人谁经常遇到压力的环境。该项目包括社区外展活动，旨在帮助教育学生了解环境在塑造动机方面的作用，以及动机对实现目标的重要性。虽然心理努力的潜在机制是众所周知的，但人们如何进行成本效益分析，以决定他们是否以及如何投入他们的心理努力，这一点却知之甚少。研究者的模型的神经和计算机制的评估心理努力分为计算明确的组成部分，包括（1）人们如何衡量他们的努力的潜在结果，（2）人们如何衡量他们的努力在多大程度上是有效的实现这些结果，以及（3）人们如何考虑不同的方式，他们可以直接他们的努力。通过将该模型与针对其每个组成部分的一组新任务以及神经活动和连接的大脑成像测量相结合，该研究绘制了评估心理努力的神经结构。这项研究还测试了这个评估过程的组成部分是如何被实验室中温和的实验引起的压力所改变的，从而更清楚地了解环境压力如何改变人们对自己努力价值的看法，这可能会导致认知任务的表现较差。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，包括动机和认知中的奖励相关和控制相关回路。这项研究还提供了新的计算和实验工具，用于探索个体和环境之间努力分配的差异性来源，有助于了解弱势背景人群在学术和职业成就方面不平等的原因，并提供了克服动机挑战的策略，以最大限度地利用现有的认知资源，从而更好地实现目标。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.