Abstract
To decide whether or not to participate in an upcoming activity, people can use their memories of intrinsically-motivating or non-intrinsically-motivating experiences during previous participations. To understand the underlying neural mechanism of intrinsic motivation memories, we used a block-design functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment to compare the neural activations during intrinsically-motivating memories versus during non-intrinsically-motivating memories. Results showed that both the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) were more activated during the recall of intrinsically-motivating memories rather than during the recall of non-intrinsically-motivating memories. Greater negative functional interactions between the VMPFC and ACC were also observed in the intrinsically-motivating situations. These findings suggest that the two complementary neural processes are employed to reconstruct intrinsically-motivating experiences: pleasure (reward related to VMPFC activity) and personal meaning (self-endorsement related to ACC activity).
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Notes
Using a conservative statistical threshold in neuroscience studies reduces Type I error rates but increases Type II error rates, which possibly simplifies psychological phenomena as publishing statistically large and obvious neural activities. To balance type I and type II error rates (Lieberman & Cunningham, 2009), we had decided to use a relatively liberal voxel-wise threshold.
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Lee, W., Reeve, J. Remembering pleasure and personal meaning from episodes of intrinsic motivation: an fMRI study. Motiv Emot 44, 810–818 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-020-09855-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-020-09855-1