Prefrontal cortex mediation of cognitive enhancement in rewarding motivational contexts

Abstract

Increasing the reward value of behavioral goals can facilitate cognitive processes required for goal achievement. This facilitation may be accomplished by the dynamic and flexible engagement of cognitive control mechanisms operating in distributed brain regions. It is still not clear, however, what are the characteristics of individuals, situations, and neural activation dynamics that optimize motivation-linked cognitive enhancement. Here we show that highly reward-sensitive individuals exhibited greater improvement of working memory performance in rewarding contexts, but exclusively on trials that were not rewarded. This effect was mediated by a shift in the temporal dynamics of activation within right lateral prefrontal cortex, from a transient to predominantly tonic mode, with an additional anticipatory transient boost. In contexts with intermittent rewards, a strategy of proactive cognitive control may enable globally optimal performance to facilitate reward attainment. Reward-sensitive individuals appear preferentially motivated to adopt this resource-demanding strategy, resulting in paradoxical benefits selectively for nonrewarded events.executive function | personality | working memory | dopamine | mixed blocked/event-related fMRI I n some task situations, successful behavioral performance leads to the potential for a highly rewarding outcome (e.g., gambling games, college entrance exams, sales contests) . When motivational salience is high, the increased value of the behavioral goal to be achieved needs to be translated into an optimal cognitive strategy (1-3). Previous experimental evidence suggests that such a translation does occur, because both cognitive performance and brain activity are enhanced in behavioral situations paired with motivational incentives (e.g., monetary rewards) (4-11). Importantly, these behavioral and neural enhancements have been found to be associated with the potential reward value available on specific trials. However, there is still very little knowledge regarding the specific behavioral situations, neural mechanisms, and individual trait factors that are critical for such enhancement effects.We have postulated a theoretical framework, known as the Dual Mechanisms of Control (DMC; ref. 12), that distinguishes two cognitive control modes, proactive and reactive (Fig. S1A). The former is characterized by sustained active maintenance and/or anticipatory implementation of behavioral goals in the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) (13,14), whereas the latter is characterized by transient, bottom-up updating of goal-relevant information within a wider brain network (15). In previous work, we have demonstrated that the DMC model predicts age-related and incentive-dependent shifts in activation dynamics in the lPFC (16-18). However, a limitation of the prior work has been the lack of a conclusive demonstration that experimental and individual differences effects in cognitive control modes are both functionally mediated by a shift in the activation dynamics within lPFC. In the current...

Beautiful Faces Enhance Verbal Working Memory Performance: An Nirs Study

“…The reaction time was significantly enhanced in the R+ condition compared to the R-condition, which is consistent with previous findings (Beck et al, 2010;Jimura et al, 2010). In addition, accuracy was marginally enhanced in our R+; this was not reported in previous studies.…”

“…Attractive faces may enhance working memory performance by activating the striatum, rather than the DLPFC. Working memory recruits not only the DLPFC, but also the anterior cingulate cortex (Bush, Luu, & Posner, 2000), parietal region (Cohen et al, 1997;Jimura et al, 2010), medial temporal lobe (Kelley et al, 1998;Olson, Page, Moore, Chatterjee, & Varfaellie, 2006), and basal ganglia (Klingberg, 2010;McNab & Klingberg, 2008;O'Reilly & Frank, 2006). Therefore, the reward effect of attractive faces observed in our study may involve other brain regions, including the striatum.…”

“…The task procedure was essentially identical to that of Jimura et al (2010). At the beginning of each trial, a fixation cross was presented for 500 ms, followed by the reward cue presented on the center of the screen for 1.0 s. The reward cue indicated whether the participants would receive a reward for making a correct response within the cut-off time (Fig.…”

A labor/leisure tradeoff in cognitive control.

“…Recent behavioral and neuroscientific research indicates that the exertion of cognitive control is intrinsically costly or aversive, and that control is only robustly recruited in the presence of relevant incentives (Jimura, Locke, & Braver, 2010;Kool, McGuire, Rosen, & All correspondence should be addressed to Wouter Kool, Department of Psychology, Green Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, wkool@princeton.edu. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.…”

“…Furthermore, cognitive labor/ leisure decisions may go awry in clinical disorders like depression or addiction, leading to maladaptive decision-making (Baler & Volkow, 2006;Murphy et al, 2001;van der Plas, Crone, van den Wildenberg, Tranel, & Bechara, 2008;Wenzlaff & Bates, 1998). Given these and other considerations, it is important to understand how such decisions are made.Recent behavioral and neuroscientific research indicates that the exertion of cognitive control is intrinsically costly or aversive, and that control is only robustly recruited in the presence of relevant incentives (Jimura, Locke, & Braver, 2010;Kool, McGuire, Rosen, & All correspondence should be addressed to Wouter Kool, Department of Psychology, Green Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, wkool@princeton.edu. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.…”