Motivational Manipulations Research Articles

Tonic dopamine: opportunity costs and the control of response vigor

Dopamine neurotransmission has long been known to exert a powerful influence over the vigor, strength, or rate of responding. However, there exists no clear understanding of the computational foundation for this effect; predominant accounts of dopamine's computational function focus on a role for phasic dopamine in controlling the discrete selection between different actions and have nothing to say about response vigor or indeed the free-operant tasks in which it is typically measured. We seek to accommodate free-operant behavioral tasks within the realm of models of optimal control and thereby capture how dopaminergic and motivational manipulations affect response vigor. We construct an average reward reinforcement learning model in which subjects choose both which action to perform and also the latency with which to perform it. Optimal control balances the costs of acting quickly against the benefits of getting reward earlier and thereby chooses a best response latency. In this framework, the long-run average rate of reward plays a key role as an opportunity cost and mediates motivational influences on rates and vigor of responding. We review evidence suggesting that the average reward rate is reported by tonic levels of dopamine putatively in the nucleus accumbens. Our extension of reinforcement learning models to free-operant tasks unites psychologically and computationally inspired ideas about the role of tonic dopamine in striatum, explaining from a normative point of view why higher levels of dopamine might be associated with more vigorous responding.

Aiming at Happiness: How Motivation Affects Attention to and Memory for Emotional Images

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, L. L., Isaacowitz, D. M., & Charles, S. T. (1999). American Psychologist, 54, 155–181) posits that older adults, and anyone else who perceives their time as limited, show a motivational shift toward emotion regulation which causes them to exhibit a positivity bias and negativity avoidance in attention and memory. We tested whether such a motivational shift can indeed cause changes in emotional processing by manipulating motivation in a sample of young adults. After the manipulation, participants looked at real-world images while their eye movements were tracked. It was found that participants motivated to regulate emotion attended less to negative than positive images and showed less looking time to all stimulus types compared to the other two conditions. No evidence was found linking the motivational manipulation to emotional memory.

The evaluative connotation of processing fluency: Inherently positive or moderated by motivational context?

A fundamental question for evaluation research is whether cues can impact evaluative responses directly or only in combination with contextual information. Focusing on the experience of processing fluency, the current work tested whether manipulating this cue’s motivational context would moderate its evaluative impact. Because fluently processed stimuli can be assumed to communicate safety, owing to implicit signals of either familiarity (through processes monitoring perception–memory coordination), we reasoned that motivation to avoid negative events should heighten preferences for fluently processed stimuli. Following a motivation manipulation, prevention-focused, but not promotion-focused, participants preferred stimuli that they were able to process quickly (Experiment 2) and that were preceded by concordant primes (Experiment 1). These findings suggest that the value of fluent processing reflects its relation to contextual features, such as one’s current motivational state.

Illusory Control and Motives for Control: The Role of Connection and Intentionality

An experiment was done to examine the control heuristic perspective on illusory control and the effects of motives on control judgments, using a computer task similar to the “light onset” task used in previous research. Desire for the outcome and reinforcement were manipulated. As predicted from a control heuristic perspective, the effect of level of reinforcement on judgments of personal control was mediated by the measure of perceived connection: the perception of the number of positive confirming cases. Motives increased illusions of control, but only in the high reinforcement condition. A mediational analysis that examined how motives affect control judgments found that when the motive to get the outcomes was high, participants had higher estimates of having acted intentionally and these estimates partially mediated the relationship between the motivation manipulation and judgments of control. It appears that perceptions of connection mediate the relationship between reinforcement and illusory control, while judgments of intentionality partially mediate the effect of motives for control and illusory control.

Reinventing mass communication: a World Health Organization tool for behavioral change to control disease.

Most of the WHO's vertical programs, because they were ill-conceived, ill-designed, and defectively implemented, have fallen far short of expectations. These limitations have been doggedly ignored by the WHO, although the authorities in India have now realized that such vertical programs are expensive and not sustainable. Launching of Communication for Behavioral Impact (COMBI) appears to mark a desperate effort to revive their performance. It represents yet another deviation from the mandate given to the WHO. In 1983, the then director general warned against motivational manipulation of people to sell health ideas, but the WHO has now brazenly come forward to look for help from the private sector. COMBI uses the jargon and language of the market place to "market" health programs; it calls this "cause-related marketing." The WHO has been most a historical in conceptualizing COMBI, as it has not learned from the failure of UNICEF's earlier venture to market child survival by employing experts in social marketing to bring about "community mobilization." The WHO should have reviewed the large body of literature on work in the health social sciences, health education, and the many programs based on the concept of "information, education, and communication." The pointed neglect of such key issues raises serious moral, ethical, and human rights questions. The COMBI approach amounts to be a breach of trust--a threat to human dignity.

Extra effort during memory retrieval may be associated with increases in eyewitness confidence.

When testifying in court, witnesses are motivated to try as hard as possible to give an accurate account. This study tested the proposition that extra effort by eyewitnesses during a memory test can lead to higher confidence ratings without any accompanying changes in accuracy. Participant-witnesses answered multiple-choice questions about a classroom visitor who had spoken 5 days earlier. In the high-motivation condition participants could earn prizes based on their memory test performance; in the low-motivation condition there were no special incentives. Although the motivation manipulation did not affect mean witness confidence, the confidence-accuracy and effort-accuracy correlations were substantially smaller in the high-motivation condition than in the low-motivation condition. Furthermore, the confidence ratings for those participants who reported expending high levels of effort in both motivation conditions were significantly higher than the confidence ratings for the low-effort participants, despite the fact that response accuracy did not differ as a function of reported effort. These findings have important implications for understanding how pressures to perform well in the courtroom can affect eyewitness confidence.

“Where there is a will…”: Motivation as a moderator of language processing by bilingual consumers

AbstractThis article examines the impact of processing motivation on language processing by bilingual consumers. The article begins by outlining the revised hierarchical model (Dufour & Kroll, 1995), which implies that second‐language conceptual processing is more challenging and less likely to be successful than first‐language processing. Then two empirical studies are conducted to investigate whether intrinsic and/or extrinsic motivation can be moderators of the impact of first‐ and second‐language processing on cognitive measures of advertising effectiveness. Study 1 finds that need for cognition, an intrinsic measure of motivation, fulfills this moderating role. Consistent with the revised hierarchical model, for low‐need‐for‐cognition individuals, first‐language processing is superior to second‐language processing. By contrast, high‐need‐for‐cognition individuals remember first‐ and second‐language ads equally well. Study 2 finds a significant interaction between need for cognition and an extrinsic manipulation of processing motivation, indicating that first language leads to greater memory under conditions that include both high motivation and low need for cognition. Our results are interpreted using consumer‐behavior models. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Task-induced fatigue states and simulated driving performance.

States of fatigue are implicated in driver impairment and motor vehicle accidents. This article reports two studies investigating two possible mechanisms for performance impairment: (1) loss of attentional resources; and (2) active regulation of matching effort to task demands. The first hypothesis predicts that fatigue effects will be accentuated by high task demands, but the second hypothesis predicts that fatigue effects will be strongest in "underload" conditions. In two studies, drivers performed a stimulated driving task, in which task demands were manipulated by varying road curvature. In a "fatigue induction" condition, the early part of the drive was occupied by performance of a demanding secondary task concurrently with driving, after which the concurrent task ceased. Post-induction driving performance was compared with a control condition in which drivers were not exposed to the induction. In both studies, the fatigue induction elicited various subjective fatigue and stress symptoms, and also raised reported workload. Fatigue effects on vehicle control and signal detection were assessed during and after the fatigue induction. The fatigue induction increased heading error, reduced steering activity, and, in the second study, reduced perceptual sensitivity on a secondary detection task. These effects were confined to driving on straight rather than on curved road sections, consistent with the effort regulation hypothesis. The second study showed that fatigue effects were moderated by a motivational manipulation. Results are interpreted within a control model, such that task-induced fatigue may reduce awareness of performance impairment, rather than reluctance or inability to mobilize compensatory effort following detection of impairment.

The Effects of Two Motivational Manipulations on the Neuropsychological Performance of Mildly Head-Injured College Students

Recently, much research has focused on the development and utilization of various motivational assessment techniques designed to identify malingered neuropsychological test performance. Other findings have suggested a strong link between the motivation of the subject and the degree to which the neuropsychological test results validly represent the individual's true level of functioning. However, the majority of the empirical work in this area has focused on only one end of the motivational spectrum, decreased motivation. In order to obtain a more complete assessment of the relationship between motivation and neuropsychological of test results, the present study involved an evaluation of the effects of motivational differences on test performance across three levels of motivation: high, low, and standard in 75 head-injured college students. Results supported past research showing significant decreases in test performance by participants given individual financial incentives ($25.00) to perform poorly. Additionally, the sensitivity of several malingering tests to this response set was supported. However, no reliable differences were found on neuropsychological or motivational tests between the group given financial incentives ($25.00) to perform well and the standard instruction group.

A computer controlled analysis of freezing behaviour

The conditioned freezing response in rats has been much used both by psychologists and neuroscientists to investigate the behavioural effects of brain lesions and of changes in motivational state. The primary advantage of the freezing response is that it can be used without motivational manipulations such as food or water deprivation. Previously, freezing has been measured by a human observer either from video recordings or during the test sessions themselves. But these methods of data collection have potential disadvantages. In the present paper, we describe a new, computer controlled, automated procedure for assessing conditioned freezing. Each conditioning chamber contains a mini-video camera. Behaviour is analysed on-line by means of a programme which compares every two adjacent seconds of video tape to generate a screen representing the percentage difference between them. A difference of <0.05% (50 pixels) is classified as a freezing response. Experiments are described in which we measure conditioned freezing and its development over time, in response to contextual cues and to a discrete tone which had been paired with foot shock. We demonstrate our apparatus and methods of data analysis to be sensitive to: number of tone-shock pairings, rat strain and tone pre-exposure.

Anticipation of play elicits high-frequency ultrasonic vocalizations in young rats.

The authors provide initial documentation that juvenile rats emit short, high-frequency ultrasonic vocalizations (high USVs, approximately 55 kHz) during rough-and-tumble play. In an observational study, they further observe that these vocalizations both correlate with and predict appetitive components of the play behavioral repertoire. Additional experiments characterized eliciting conditions for high USVs. Without prior play exposure, rats separated by a screen vocalized less than playing rats, but after only 1 play session, separated rats vocalized more than playing rats. This findings suggested that high USVs were linked to a motivational state rather than specific play behaviors or general activity. Furthermore, individual rats vocalized more in a chamber associated with play than in a habituated control chamber. Finally, congruent and incongruent motivational manipulations modulated vocalization expression. Although play deprivation enhanced high USVs, an arousing but aversive stimulus (bright light) reduced them. Taken together, these findings suggest that high USVs may index an appetitive motivation to play in juvenile rats.

Motivation, and Fatigue-Related Impairments in Simulated Driving

The effect of a motivational manipulation in reducing fatigue-related impairments in simulated driving performance was examined. Drivers performed both a fatiguing drive and a control drive. The motivational manipulation, a driving skill assessment instruction, appeared in early and late stages of both drives. Lateral control of the vehicle was assessed on straight and curved road sections early and late during the assessment instruction in both drives. The results indicate that the instruction only affected straight-road driving in the later part of both drives. During the later part of the control drive, the instruction produced a performance improvement only while the instruction was actually presented. In the fatigue drive, performance continued to improve even after cessation of the instruction, converging to the level of control drive performance. Fatigued drivers remain capable of increasing task effort in response to a motivating instruction, but fatigue may impair the ability to synchronize effort with changing task demands.

The correlates of addiction concern among adolescents at high risk for drug abuse.

A teenager's awareness that he or she is becoming a drug addict or alcoholic is likely to lead that youth to try to get treatment. This report examined correlates of addiction concern among a sample of youth at high risk for drug abuse. Approximately 36% of a sample of 274 students at two southern California continuation high schools perceived themselves at risk for drug or alcohol addiction. Whereas 15 of 25 demographic, drug use, social psychological, or health orientation related variables were associated with an addiction concern measure in bivariate analyses, after partialing out covariation among its correlates, three drug use indices, two items that measured the importance of health as a value, and an assertiveness measure remained significant nonredundant correlates of addiction concern. These results suggest a potential importance of both manipulation of health motivation and social skills instruction in facilitating the prevention of adolescent drug abuse.

The effect of food deprivation on the expression of foraging and exploratory behaviour in the growing pig

Growing pigs spend considerable time orally manipulating their environment including straw and their pen-mates, leading to problems such as tail biting. It is unclear if this active behaviour reflects either foraging motivation, exploratory motivation or a combination of both. This problem is exacerbated by the possibility that both motivational systems share certain behavioural elements. The aim of this experiment was to determine the extent to which appetitive foraging is separable from intrinsic exploration by manipulating both feeding motivation and the novelty of the external environment. The behaviour of 12 growing male pigs was recorded during tests lasting 35 min whilst placed in a familiar test arena with a woodbark/sand foraging substrate. Tests were conducted in blocks lasting 8 days during which pigs were fed a commercial food either ad libitum (Treatment H) or at a 20% reduction thereof (Treatment L). A replicated Latin square design allowed pigs to be twice provided with either novel objects, food (50 g) or nothing in a specific ‘targetarea’ of substrate at either feeding level. Food restriction although not affecting locomotion resulted in an increase in the proportion of time spent rooting the substrate (0.05 vs. 0.08 for H versus L pigs respectively; standard error of the difference (SED) 0.008; P < 0.01), a decrease in the proportion of time spent lying (0.17 vs. 0.12; SED 0.027; P < 0.05), and an increase in the proportion of time spent in the target-area (0.05 vs. 0.08; SED 0.011; P < 0.05), with no effect of novel object presentation in any case. The presentation of novel objects resulted in an increase in the rate of visits to the target-area (0.30, 0.23 and 0.24 for novel objects, food and control treatments respectively; SED 0.025 visits min −1; P < 0.05) which was independent of feeding level. These results indicate that the increase in rooting and decrease in lying is a reflection of an increased level of feeding motivation produced by food restriction. Rooting was an expression of appetitive foraging as it was unaffected by novel object presentation. The increase in frequency of visits to the target-area due to novel object presentation was an expression of intrinsic exploration as it was independent of feeding motivation. Therefore, it was concluded that appetitive foraging behaviour and intrinsic exploration can be experimentally separated by the controlled manipulation of both feeding motivation and specific environmental stimuli.

Age differences in temporal monitoring and equal sharing in a fixed‐duration sharing task

Previous research has demonstrated age differences in prosocial behaviours and has focused on the development of theoretically prescribed cognitive abilities thought to be prerequisite. However, the empirical relations between cognitive abilities and prosocial behaviours have typically not been large and there has been considerable inconsistency in these findings. The present studies were based upon an information processing perspective that assumes task‐specific cognitive demands for prosocial behaviours. In these studies, the effect of children's temporal monitoring abilities was examined as a logical prerequisite for the equal sharing of a desirable object within a limited time period. In the first study, age differences in equal sharing were partially accounted for by age differences in the temporal monitoring abilities of 5–12‐year‐old‐children. In the second and third studies, 3–5‐year‐old preschool children shared more equally when there was a reduction in the cognitive demands involved in temporal monitoring. In addition, in all three studies motivational manipulations consisting of either an instructional set or the friendship status of the participating peer influenced equal sharing. These findings support the proposition that the range of prosocial behaviours available to children is limited by the development of task‐specific cognitive abilities, and that the motivation properties of the situation also influence the expression of prosocial behaviours.

Paranoid-nonparanoid differences — psychophysiological parallels

It was predicted that the psychological differences between paranoids and nonparanoids would be parallel by differences in psychophysiological responses to stimuli varying along both informational and motivational dimensions. Skin conductance and heart rate responses to stimuli in a guessing task were measured in a group of paranoid patients and compared with those from non-paranoid and non-patient controls. A group of nonschizophrenic patients on phenothiazine medication served as drug-matched controls. Skin conductance level, response frequency and amplitude data are reported; heart rate response changes were examined by means of times series analysis and reported as first and second deceleration and first and second acceleration components. It was predicted that paranoid patients would show a greater increase in skin conductance measures with cognitive demand, and an increase in acceleratory components of the heart rate to increase in motivational variables. The normal pattern of greater electrodermal responsing to the negative stimuli than the positive, and greater heart rate acceleration to the positive stimuli but not the negative (Fowles, 1980) was predicted to be reversed in schizophrenia patients, and possibly more marked in paranoids. Cognitive manipulations showed the predicted increase in electrodermal and heart rate responding in normal controls. The paranoid subjects showed a similar increase as a function of task demands, but there was no significant difference between the other groups. Motivational manipulations produced increased skin conductance responding and increases in heart rate acceleration components in normal controls, this was not parallelled in the patient groups. All subject groups failed to show greater electrodermal activity to negative than to positive stimuli. Normal controls showed significant heart rate acceleration to positive as compared to negative stimuli, this pattern was reversed in paranoid patients.

Motivational influences on cognition: Task involvement, ego involvement, and depth of information processing.

In Experiment 1, 5th- and 6th-grade children were randomly assigned to either a task-focused motivational condition, an ego-focused condition, or a control group. They received a list of 60 words manipulated to be encoded at either shallow or deep levels of processing. An unexpected recall test then followed. Experiment 2 used the same general procedure except that the motivational manipulation was timed to occur at either encoding or retrieval. In both experiments ego involvement resulted in poorer word recall at deep rather than at shallow processing levels. Experiment 2 also indicated that the motivational deficits resulting from ego involvement are more pervasive at the information-retrieval stage. The usefulness of these findings for promoting greater conceptual clarity among motivation constructs is discussed.

Individual Differences and Arousal: Implications for the Study of Mood and Memory

Abstract Inconsistent findings in the study of mood-related effects on memory are discussed in terms of the effects of arousal on cognitive processes. Manipulations used in studies of mood and memory typically affect arousal as well as affective valence. Although mood-related effects on memory are often interpreted in terms of valence, a consideration of arousal-mediated effects rarely occurs. In the motivation and performance literature, however, variations in arousal have been shown to interact with retention interval to affect immediate and delayed recall. Arousal is hypothesised to hinder some aspect of short-term memory but facilitate both the speed of processing and some aspect of storage for long-term retrieval. The construct of arousal is also used more generally to organise the effects of stable individual differences in personality and a variety of motivational manipulations on cognitive performance. The implications of these effects of arousal for the pattern of inconsistent findings in the study of mood-related effects on memory are discussed in terms of the general effects of arousal on cognitive performance.

Motivation Orientation and Modeled Instruction Strategies: The Effects on Form and Accuracy

The present study examined the potential interaction effects of using different instructional strategies with intrinsically and extrinsically motivated youths. Subjects whose motivation to participate in sports was either one of intrinsic mastery or extrinsic mastery were randomly placed in one of two instructional groups: knowledge of results (KR) or knowledge of performance (KP). All four groups received a videotaped, modeled demonstration of the skill to be learned, the tennis forehand. Subjects participated in a 3-day acquisition period and a 1-day testing phase, during which both form and outcome scores were recorded. Analysis of acquisition outcome scores yielded no significant differences between motivational orientation or instructional groups. Multivariate analysis of the test phase outcome and form scores revealed significant group differences, as well as significant group-by-motivation and group-by-blocks interactions. Subsequent discriminant analyses indicated that form scores were more affected than outcome scores by the instructional and motivational group manipulations. The interaction results of the test phase supported the prediction of different performance effects as a function of motivational orientation and instructional strategy.

Performance Deficits on Tests of Problem Solving in Alcoholics: Cognitive or Motivational Impairment?

This study tests the hypothesis that the performance deficits of alcoholics on tests of problem-solving abilities are due to impairment in motivation. The Conceptual Level Analogy Test and the Levine Hypothesis Test were administered to 40 sober middle-aged male alcoholic and 30 nonalcoholic individuals in a 2 x 2 [Group (alcoholic, nonalcoholic) by Monetary Incentive (incentive, no incentive)] between-subjects covariance design. The motivational manipulation was a performance-contingent monetary incentive. On the Levine test alcoholics performed less well than nonalcoholics but there were no incentive effects. On the analogy test, surprisingly, alcoholics did not differ from nonalcoholics in performance (probably due to the feedback necessitated by use of a performance-contingent incentive) although incentive effects were found across groups. However, there were no significant Group by Incentive interactions on either test or on self-report questionnaires of subjective states (e.g., effort expended) experienced during the tests. Thus, no evidence was found to support the impaired motivation hypothesis. The cognitive hypothesis remains as the most credible hypothesis to account for the performance deficits of alcoholics on tests of problem-solving ability.