The science of motivation
It is well established that humans tend to be extrinsically motivated, particularly by monetary incentives. “Money is a major driving force for most people in everyday life and is hence a prime example of extrinsic motivation,” says Ruth Krebs(opens in new window), a professor of Psychology at Ghent University(opens in new window). Past research happening at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that monetary incentives can improve our cognitive functions. “This includes our visual attention, conflict resolution and memory formation,” explains Krebs. “However, even with these observations, we still don’t fully understand how the prospect of reward is transformed into various cognitive benefits.” With the support of the EU-funded REMOTIVATE project, Krebs is integrating behavioural and neuroimaging data to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how reward signals affect human cognition.
Overcoming challenges
According to Krebs, the biggest challenge this European Research Council(opens in new window) supported project faced was collecting neuroimaging data from small brain structures within the dopamine and norepinephrine system. “These neurotransmitters play a fundamental role in processing rewarding and other behaviourally relevant stimuli,” she says. Although her team successfully isolated these regions using specialised imaging sequences, the signal-to-noise ratio is inherently low, rendering the collected data less robust than what could be extracted from larger brain regions. Yet despite this challenge, the project did reveal some very important results. “One of our key findings was that the prospect of being rewarded can actually have a detrimental effect on people’s performance,” notes Krebs. For example, the project found that a reward signal can trigger an approach response even when the individual is explicitly instructed to do the opposite (i.e. an avoid response). “This observation likely goes back to an evolutionary benefit of approaching rewarding stimuli and might explain why it is difficult to resist such events in daily life,” notes Krebs. The research team also demonstrated that social stimuli affect people’s performance in a similar way – even though these stimuli don’t entail a monetary value. “This overlap indicates that the effect of monetary incentives on human cognition is less unique than we previously thought,” she adds.
Inspiring future research
Taken together, these results have opened the door to a lively and critical discussion on how extrinsic rewards can shape human behaviour. “Reward effects are not only a subject within psychology and economics. They also have an everyday impact in education and on the work floor,” concludes Krebs. “I hope our results can inspire future research in these applied domains.” On this note, Krebs has already started a new line of research that focuses on the role motivation plays in achieving environmental and sustainability related goals.
