Motivation can counteract the effects of mental fatigue. However, the underlying mechanism by which motivation affects performance in mentally fatiguing tasks is obscure.

In this paper, we propose goal competition as a paradigm to understand the role of motivation and built three models of mental fatigue studies to demonstrate the mechanism in a cognitive architecture named PRIMs. Each of these studies explored the impact of reward and mental fatigue on performance. Overall, performance decreased in nonreward conditions but remained stable in reward conditions.

The comparisons between our models and empirical data showed that our models were able to capture human performance. We managed to model changes in performance levels by adjusting the value of the main task goals, which controls the competition with distractions. In all the tasks modeled, the best model fits were obtained by a linear decrease in goal activation, suggesting this is a general pattern. We discuss possible mechanisms for activation decrease, and the potential of goal competition to model motivation.

动机可以抵消精神疲劳的影响。但是，在动机上令人疲劳的任务中，动机影响绩效的潜在机制尚不清楚。

在本文中，我们提出了目标竞争作为理解动机作用的范例，并建立了三种精神疲劳研究模型来证明这种机制在名为PRIMs的认知体系中的作用。这些研究中的每一项都探讨了奖励和精神疲劳对绩效的影响。总体而言，在非奖励条件下绩效下降，但在奖励条件下保持稳定。

我们的模型与经验数据之间的比较表明，我们的模型能够捕获人类绩效。通过调整主要任务目标的价值，我们设法对绩效水平的变化进行建模，从而分心地控制竞争。在所有建模任务中，通过线性减少目标激活来获得最佳模型拟合，这表明这是一种普遍模式。我们讨论了激活减少的可能机制，以及目标竞争对动机进行建模的潜力。