Identifying the neural substrates of intrinsic motivation during task performance

Abstract

Intrinsic motivation is the inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenge, to explore and investigate, and to stretch and extend one's capacities. When people imagine performing intrinsically motivating tasks, they show heightened anterior insular cortex (AIC) activity. To fully explain the neural system of intrinsic motivation, however, requires assessing neural activity while people actually perform intrinsically motivating tasks (i.e., while answering curiosity-inducing questions or solving competence-enabling anagrams). Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that the neural system of intrinsic motivation involves not only AIC activity, but also striatum activity and, further, AIC-striatum functional interactions. These findings suggest that subjective feelings of intrinsic satisfaction (associated with AIC activations), reward processing (associated with striatum activations), and their interactions underlie the actual experience of intrinsic motivation. These neural findings are consistent with the conceptualization of intrinsic motivation as the pursuit and satisfaction of subjective feelings (interest and enjoyment) as intrinsic rewards.

Reflections on self‐determination theory as an organizing framework for personality psychology: Interfaces, integrations, issues, and unfinished business

“…In their review, Reeve and Lee () detail their programmatic research capturing some of the major neural underpinnings of intrinsic motivation and autonomous regulation. Their studies illustrate how basic need satisfactions have associated striatal activations indicative of inherent rewards, and they suggest a specific role for the anterior insular cortex in intrinsically motivated and autonomous engagement (e.g., Lee & Reeve, ).…”

A neuroscientific perspective on basic psychological needs

“…People can experience intrinsic motivation as they pursue competence need satisfaction (Deci & Ryan, ). In many neuroscience experiments, participants perform a series of interesting tasks and receive performance feedback that is designed to effect a change in their perceived competence (Elliott, Frith, & Dolan, ; Lee & Kim, ; Lee & Reeve, ; Murayama et al, ). That is, as participants effectively performed the interesting tasks and received positive (i.e., success, improvement) feedback, they experienced competence satisfaction and subsequently intrinsic motivation.…”

“…We also conducted a neuroscience study examining and confirming the neural correlates of intrinsic motivation based on competence satisfaction (Lee & Reeve, ). In this study, participants sometimes worked on and solved optimally challenging anagrams, whereas at other times they worked on easy anagrams (i.e., a within‐subjects, repeated‐measures research design).…”

“…Using an EEG methodology, participants who were exposed to conditions of optimal challenge (vs. a lack of challenge) showed cortical activation (a stimulus‐preceding negativity [SPN] response) when they were anticipating positive performance feedback (Meng, Pei, Zheng, & Ma, ). Such an experience of suspense over what will happen next, having an opportunity to discover new information, and anticipating satisfaction from attaining new or competence‐affirming information has been associated with experiences of curiosity and intrinsic motivation (Abuhamdeh, Csikszentmihalyi, & Jalal, ; Lee & Reeve, ).…”

Motivated for near impossibility: How task type and reward modulate task enjoyment and the striatal activation for extremely difficult task

“…In contrast, we are often motivated for challenging tasks in our daily life when the task requires some skills. When task success is contingent upon one's skills, people focus more on the improvement of their skills, rather than task success itself; as a result, people may exhibit greater persistence after failure (Lee and Kim, 2014;Lee and Reeve, 2017), perhaps even when the task is almost impossible to achieve. Second, previous research has typically implemented extrinsic rewards to quantify the value of task cues.…”