Motivational Influences on Cognitive Control: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

Motivation is an important component of self-regulation that helps set the effort level an organism is willing to expend to achieve a desired goal. However, motivation is an elusive concept in psychological research, with investigations typically targeting either very macro-level (e.g., effects of personality individual differences and experimental manipulations on global behavior) or very micro-level (e.g., physiological interventions targeting specific brain structures) processes. Thus, the current state of knowledge is very poor regarding the particular mechanisms by which motivation influences cognitive and neural systems to drive changes in specific components of behavior. This chapter reviews major perspectives on motivation arising from both the social-personality and neuroscience literatures, and then discuss how a cognitive neuroscience perspective might be fruitfully applied to fill the gaps between them. Specifically, the chapter reviews literature, including our own recent work, that suggests motivational manipulations impact brain regions associated with the exertion of specific cognitive control functions. The chapter concludes by outlining unresolved questions in motivation, and by suggesting directions for future progress in this domain.