In everyday life, we have to decide whether it is worth exerting effort to obtain rewards. Effort can be experienced in different domains, with some tasks requiring significant cognitive demand and others being more physically effortful. The motivation to exert effort for reward is highly subjective and varies considerably across the different domains of behaviour. However, very little is known about the computational or neural basis of how different effort costs are subjectively weighed against rewards. Is there a common, domain-general system of brain areas that evaluates all costs and benefits? Here, we used computational modelling and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the mechanisms underlying value processing in both the cognitive and physical domains. Participants were trained on two novel tasks that parametrically varied either cognitive or physical effort. During fMRI, participants indicated their preferences between a fixed low-effort/low-reward option and a variable higher-effort/higher-reward offer for each effort domain. Critically, reward devaluation by both cognitive and physical effort was subserved by a common network of areas, including the dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the intraparietal sulcus, and the anterior insula. Activity within these domain-general areas also covaried negatively with reward and positively with effort, suggesting an integration of these parameters within these areas. Additionally, the amygdala appeared to play a unique, domain-specific role in processing the value of rewards associated with cognitive effort. These results are the first to reveal the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying subjective cost–benefit valuation across different domains of effort and provide insight into the multidimensional nature of motivation.

Short-term memory in middle-aged individuals with different APOE alleles was examined using a recently developed task which is sensitive to medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage. Individuals (age-range: 40–51 years) with ε3/ε3, ε3/ε4 and ε4/ε4 APOE genotypes (N = 60) performed a delayed estimation task with a sensitive continuous measure of report. The paradigm allowed us to measure memory for items and their locations, as well as maintenance of identity-location feature binding in memory. There was a significant gene-dosage dependent effect of the ε4 allele on performance: memory decay or forgetting was slower in ε4 carriers, as measured by localization error and after controlling for misbinding errors. Furthermore ε4 carriers made less misbinding errors. These findings were specific to male carriers only. Thus, male ε4 carriers are at a behavioral advantage in midlife on a sensitive task of short-term memory. The results would be consistent with an antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis and hightight the interaction of gender on the influence of APOE in cognition.

Classical views of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) have established that it plays a crucial role in long-term memory (LTM). Here we demonstrate, in a sample of patients who have undergone anterior temporal lobectomy for the treatment of pharmacoresistant epilepsy, that the MTL additionally plays a specific, causal role in short-term memory (STM). Patients (n=22) and age-matched healthy control participants (n=26) performed a STM task with a sensitive continuous report measure. This paradigm allowed us to examine recall memory for object identity, location and object-location binding, independently on a trial-by-trial basis. Our findings point to a specific involvement of MTL in object-location binding, but, crucially, not retention of either object identity or location. Therefore the MTL appears to perform a specific computation: binding disparate features that belong to a memory. These results echo findings from previous studies, which have identified a role for the MTL in relational binding for LTM, and support the proposal that MTL regions perform such a function for both STM and LTM, independent of the retention duration. Furthermore, these findings and the methodology employed here may provide a simple, sensitive and clinically valuable means to test memory dysfunuction in MTL disorders.

It has recently been proposed that short-term memory (STM) binding deficits might be an important feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD), providing a potential avenue for earlier detection of this disorder. By contrast, work in Parkinson's disease (PD), using different tasks, has suggested that the STM impairment in this condition is characterised by increased random guessing, possibly due to fluctuating attention. In the present study, to establish whether a misbinding impairment is present in sporadic late-onset AD (LOAD) and increased guessing is a feature of PD, we compared the performance of these patient groups to two control populations: healthy age-matched controls and individuals with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI) with comparable recruitment history as patients. All participants performed a sensitive task of STM that required high resolution retention of object-location bindings. This paradigm also enabled us to explore the underlying sources of error contributing to impaired STM in patients with LOAD and PD using computational modelling of response error. Patients with LOAD performed significantly worse than other groups on this task. Importantly their impaired memory was associated with increased misbinding errors. This was in contrast to patients with PD who made significantly more guessing responses. These findings therefore provide additional support for the presence of two doubly dissociable signatures of STM deficit in AD and PD, with binding impairment in AD and increased random guessing characterising the STM deficit in PD. The task used to measure memory precision here provides an easy-to-administer assessment of STM that is sensitive to the different types of deficit in AD and PD and hence has the potential to inform clinical practice.