Cognitive-motivational interactions: Beyond boxes-and-arrows models of the mind-brain.

Abstract

How do motivation and cognitive control interact in brain and behavior? The past decade has witnessed a steady growth in studies investigating both the behavioral and the brain basis of these interactions. In this paper, I describe such interactions in the context of the dual completion model, which proposes that motivational significance influences both perceptual and executive competition. Embracing a research agenda that attempts to understand cognition-motivation interactions highlights considerable challenges faced by investigators. For example, even the standard language utilized, with terms such as “perception,” “attention,” “cognition,” and “motivation,” encourages a modular-like conceptualization of the underlying processes and mechanisms. I propose that large-scale interactions involving both task-related and valuation-related networks help understand how motivation shapes executive function. I argue that, ultimately, the mind and brain sciences need to move beyond “boxes and arrows” and fully embrace the richness and complexity of the interactions between motivation and cognition. In the last 10 years, the study in humans of the interactions of motivation with perception and cognition has grown at a fast pace. The growth has included behavioral studies characterizing the processes involved, and neuroimaging studies investigating the regions and circuits underlying the behaviors in question. This literature acknowledges the fact that perception and cognition do not happen in a vacuum but are, instead, situated in contexts that feature value. Although this assertion is uncontroversial, the mind and brain sciences have studied perception and cognition for many decades by largely extricating value from them. Fortunately, this state of affairs has now changed and the field has a newfound vigor in attempting to understand the impact of motivation on these mental functions.

Reward boosts neural coding of task rules to optimise cognitive flexibility

“…To conclude, previous work has shown that reward motivation may improve cognitive performance by boosting abstract task codes (Etzel et al, 2016) or biasing perceptual representations to prioritise sensory information relevant to current task goals (Hickey & Peelen, 2015;Pessoa, 2017;Serences, 2008;Serences & Saproo, 2010). Here we show that high reward prospect can enhance neural coding of task information as well as task-relevant sensory information, without altering representations for task-irrelevant sensory information.…”

“…Here we show that transient changes in prospective reward can also modulate task-relevant perceptual feature representations. Second, research using prospective reward cues has led to the proposal that reward motivation might benefit attentional filtering, either by enhancing task-relevant perceptual representations or supressing task-irrelevant representations (Pessoa, 2017). Hickey & Peelen (2015) found evidence for both of these mechanisms, showing that reward could either enhance or suppress perceptual representations as a function of task-relevance.…”

“…We used RSA (Kriegeskorte et al, 2008) to investigate how reward prospect influenced neural coding for different kinds of task-relevant information. The logic of this approach was to characterise neural coding patterns elicited by different trial conditions and test whether reward prospect led to more distinct task representations for the two abstract tasks being performed (colour vs shape judgements; Etzel et al, 2016;Westbrook & Braver, 2016) or higher neural coding for task-relevant compared to irrelevant target features (Pessoa, 2017). Incorrect and omission trials were excluded from EEG analyses.…”

Representational organization of novel task sets during proactive encoding

“…It could increase the efficiency of task reconfiguration (Braem & 720 Egner, 2018), as indexed by the improvements in behavior, while the specific rule representations 721 would remain equally structured. Nonetheless, more research is needed to properly characterize 722 the intricate interactions among proactive control and motivation (Pessoa, 2017) in rich task 723 environments, more akin to daily life situations. 724…”

“…Finally, cognitive control and motivation maintain an intricate relationship during task 92 preparation (Pessoa, 2009(Pessoa, , 2017. Reward expectation boosts cue-locked activity across the FP 93 network (Parro, Dixon, & Christoff, 2017), and it has been recently linked to stronger anticipatory 94 rule encoding (Etzel, Cole, Zacks, Kay, & Braver, 2016).…”