CAREER: The vital role of motivation in cognition

职业：动机在认知中的重要作用

基本信息

批准号：
2046111
负责人：
Amitai Shenhav
金额：
$ 79.41万
依托单位：
Brown University
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Continuing Grant
财政年份：
2021
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2021-09-01 至 2026-08-31
项目状态：
未结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2046111&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
CAREER vital role motivation cognition

项目摘要

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.

为了实现长期目标，人们需要施加控制，这是一种使他们能够集中思想并指导行动的心理认知能力。然而，人们常常无法进行充分且有针对性的认知控制，从而导致。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特定任务上付出脑力劳动的成本和收益。众所周知，某人处于有压力的环境中这项工作将更好地理解教育、职业和健康目标的实现差异的根源，以及为什么这些成就结果对于经常遇到压力环境的个人来说可能会有所不同。教育学生环境在塑造动机方面所起的作用，以及动机对于实现目标的重要性。虽然脑力劳动背后的机制众所周知，但人们如何进行成本效益分析却知之甚少。决定他们是否以及如何投入脑力劳动。研究人员的脑力努力评估的神经和计算机制模型将这种评估划分为计算上明确的部分，包括（1）人们如何权衡其努力的潜在结果，（2）人们如何权衡他们的努力的程度有效实现这些结果，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，通过将该模型与针对其每个组成部分的一组新颖的任务以及神经活动的大脑成像测量相结合。和连接性，这项研究绘制了评估背后的神经架构这项研究还测试了实验室中实验引起的轻微压力如何改变这一评估过程的组成部分，从而更清楚地了解环境压力因素如何改变人们对其努力价值的看法，从而可能导致表现较差。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。探究不同个体和环境中努力分配差异的根源，帮助了解来自弱势背景的人在学术和职业成就上不平等的原因，并提供克服动机挑战的策略，以便充分利用一个人现有的认知资源和该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。